Seagate buys Evault

SEAGATE JUST bought Evault, and with it basically launched a services division. Evault is an online backup company, you tell it what to back up, it uploads the files to a server bank somewhere, and off you go. They maintain the drives so you don't have to, theoretically it is bulletproof.

The tie in is pretty obvious, Seagate is looking to go from low margin businesses (drives) to higher margin businesses (services), so this is a natural play. It can brand Evault to something silly like Seagate Core 2 Duo, and get a customer recognition boost from it.

The fact that Evault needs a lot of drives doesn't hurt much either. This looks to be a good thing for Seagate, and possibly a good thing for users until they realize how long it will take to restore a failed 500GB drive over a DSL connection. µ