Mandriva Buys Linbox for Access Server, Backup Software

Published: October 10, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Commercial Linux distributor Mandriva continues to do acquisitions to build up its business. Last week, Mandriva said that it acquired Linbox FAS, a company that has created a set of tools that provide authentication for shared server and network resources, asset management, and backup and recovery for Linux machines.

Linbox FAS is based in Paris, just like Mandriva, and also has operations in the northeast Lorraine region of France, famous for its wonderful quiche and the horrific Battle of Verdun during World War I. Linbox was founded in 1996 under the name Free and Alter Soft, which acquired another company called Linbox in 2001 and changed its name to Linbox FAS. The acquired firm has a dozen employees, according to Mandriva, and had sales of $844,000 in 2005 and broke even. Mandriva, which paid $2.1 million for the acquisition, said that Linbox was on track to post sales of over $1 million in 2006 and was also expected to be in the black, too. Hence the high multiple for the acquisition. Mandriva is doing the acquisition with $1.74 million in stock plus $401,000 in cash.

Linbox has three major products: Linbox Directory Server and Linbox Rescue Server. The former, which also was known as Linbox Versatile Server, provides shared access to Internet and file resources and providers user authentication to those resources. In plain English, it lets multiple end users share an Internet connection in an authenticated rather than an anonymous way. Linbox Rescue Server is used to manage and backup Linux or Windows PCs from a central server. The PCs can be on the local network, or can be remote from the local network and accessed over a wide area network link. The software can presumably also be used to archive and recover data stored on Linux and Windows servers as well, but the product descriptions do not emphasize this. The software backs up complete images of the hard drives on machines, which is the important thing to know.

"This acquisition is consistent with Mandriva's external growth plans," explained Francois Bancilhon, Mandriva's chief executive officer. "It reinforces our enterprise strategy, by enriching our product and technology portfolio, and by bringing to critical mass our enterprise team." Exactly how the Linbox products will be integrated into the various Mandriva Linuxes remains to be seen.

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