The era of Indianapolis being a city of “best kept secrets” is over. So over. Nowhere is that more obvious than within the tech community, which has amassed more than 20 acquisitions or IPOs over the last 10 years and unleashed $7 billion in market value.

Carbonite (NASDAQ: CARB) — the Boston-based data protection company named after the fictional substance used to freeze Han Solo in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back — is one of several major tech brands like Salesforce and Genesys that is counting on the talent and innovation generated here in Indianapolis to play a big part in the company’s global future.

Originally focused on PCs and home office backup, Carbonite quickly became a leading consumer-tech brand name known for making it easy to recover all of your files should the worst happen. In 2011, the company launched its first small business offering, and Carbonite has been successfully moving up-market into the business data protection space ever since.

With the January acquisition of DoubleTake Software, Carbonite added the 70-person R&D operation based in Indianapolis and a powerful, established array of business products to its data protection arsenal. While DoubleTake has been a force in data protection since Rob Beeler founded it in a spare bedroom of his house in 1995, out-of-state ownership and no real need for local marketing prevented the brand from gaining much notoriety in its Hoosier hometown. But that’s all about to change.

Today, the unified employees and assets are all converging under the Carbonite brand; they are focused on leading the way for disaster recovery and migration for the cloud across all platforms and industries; and they are hiring up to 20 top-performing tech pros for new positions in Indianapolis before the end of the year.

Of note: Carbonite’s High Availability product (originally developed in Indianapolis) offers the option to fail over to the backup at a moment’s notice, with no human interaction and virtually no interruption in service, across all physical, virtual, and cloud platforms. Carbonite calls it “any-to-any,” and while there are products that fail over for a virtual server or a particular physical server, Carbonite says its any-to-any High Availability product is the only one on the market that can both replicate and fail over between any of those platforms.

Rob Beeler

Rob BeelerVice President, Carbonite

“In terms of uniqueness, I’m really excited about the fact that Carbonite pulls together a full range of data protection technologies,” said Rob Beeler, now serving as vice president, Carbonite. “From the high availability functionality that we bring, to data and server backup provided with our other products, such as Evault, the things we do are complex and they require the best problem solvers.

“We have open positions for software developers, testers, product managers and more. It’s challenging work that’s down in the weeds with operating systems, file systems and the cloud, so we attract professionals who are up for that challenge — people who are serious about learning and growing with the technology and growing their own careers.”

Beeler described Carbonite in Indianapolis as “a pretty tight knit group” that has held onto its startup/entrepreneurial culture through ownership changes in the past, and is now a great fit with the agile method approach used both in Indy and company wide. He said Carbonite is surprisingly laid back for a company that is so focused on growth and technical innovation, and that former DoubleTake employees have taken notice and returned to be a part of the new company with many of their previous co-workers.

Brian Owens, director, sustaining engineering, was excited to join Carbonite and rejoin Beeler and several of his previous co-workers after four years away working at a health tech startup. He’d spent 16 years with DoubleTake prior to that and said that when he heard about the acquisition he immediately contacted Beeler to find out how he could be a part of what Carbonite was going to be building in Indianapolis.

Beeler admits that the Indianapolis office still has work to do to complete its transition to the Carbonite brand, but that the strong culture is sustaining them through some reconstruction that will be finished this summer. The enviable Star Wars “geek culture” prevalent throughout Carbonite’s other offices will be central to the new offices in Indy, where they also enjoy unlimited vacation, a cafe with frequent free breakfasts and lunches, and a host of other amenities that most people would expect from a startup rather than a public company.

“Like I said, we’re a pretty tight-knit group that really enjoys coming into work together, but I think it’s the work that’s a big part of the draw for new hires,” Beeler said. “The best tech folks want to work with really interesting, cutting edge products. That’s exactly what the Indianapolis team has always done and now as Carbonite it’s wide open for even more opportunity as we continue to grow and innovate and disrupt the world of data protection.”