Imation makes another tech purchase, adds ex-CEO to company

Published by Minneapolis / St. Paul Business Journal

Imation Corp. said Tuesday it has bought intellectual property and other assets from Nine Technology and hired two of that company's top executives.

The software Imation acquired as part of the deal eliminates redundancies in data. That makes the process of backing up and recovering data faster and cheaper, Imation said in a press statement.

Middleboro, Mass.-based Nine Technology will continue to operate as a standalone provider of data-protection services, Oakdale-based Imation said in a news release.

Imation (NYSE: IMN) also said Nine Technology founder and former CEO Tom Gelson is joining Imation, as is Alex Stoev, Nine's former chief technology officer.

Terms of the deal were not announced.

"Imation’s acquisition of this important data deduplication technology is another major step in our scalable storage growth strategy,” Ian Williams, Imation vice president for global marketing and product management, said in the news release.

Imation has made several purchases this year. It bought IronKey's secure data storage hardware business in September. It also acquired ProStor Systems , MXI Security andEncryptx Corp.