Veritas to Purchase E-Mail Archive Vendor KVS

Veritas Software Corp. announced on Tuesday that it has agreed to acquire KVault Software Ltd., a maker of policy-based e-mail archive software, in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $225 million.

The acquisition is expected to close by the end of September, according to officials of Mountain View, Calif.-based Veritas. Once the purchase is finalized, the 200 employees of Winnersh Triangle, England.-based KVS will operate under a separate Veritas business unit led by the current KVS management team.

Eventually the KVS brand name and product offerings will be absorbed into Veritas’ product portfolio, noted Mark Bregman, executive vice president of product operations for the storage software maker. Bregman said Veritas should provide details about publishing an integration road map featuring KVS technology within the next 30 to 60 days.

KVS software helps customers more easily manage content growth in their corporate e-mail environments by archiving and indexing data immersed in platforms such as Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Office, and other file systems featuring unstructured data.

Bregman said KVS’ policy-based data migration technology will effectively replace Veritas’ current Data Lifecycle Manager software product. Aimed at assisting companies with a slew of regulatory requirement demands by enabling administrators to set policies for migration, retention and file management, Data Lifecycle Manger plugs into Veritas’ NetBackup and Backup Exec software tools.

“One of the things we’ll be doing [with KVS technology] is building integration to [Veritas] storage management and backup capabilities. It really does replace our current data lifecycle product,” said Bregman. “The road map for data lifecycle management has further capabilities that we’ll be putting on the road map for the new [Veritas] product.”

Once the KVS acquisition closes, it will be interesting to see how Veritas moves forward with KVS’ strong relationship and technology integration with rival storage software giant EMC Corp.—particularly since a large portion of EMC Centera customers deploy KVS e-mail archive software.

“The KVS product is the No. 1 solution driving Centera as far as we understand it. Our expectation is that relationship will change,” said Bergman.

Click here to read eWEEK’s interview with Veritas CEO Gary Bloom.

However, for its part EMC said it does not expect its strong relationship with KVS to change in light of the Veritas acquisition. “KVS had been a valued Centera partner in the past. In this morning’s analyst call, KVS noted that 25 percent of its business comes from Centera. From EMC’s perspective, nothing will change this,” said a spokesman of Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC.

Peter Gerr, an analyst with Milford, Mass.-based Enterprise Strategy Group, said it would behoove Veritas to tread carefully over existing KVS partnerships, including EMC, to not deter the company’s favorable standing among customers.

“The two primary [KVS] relationships are with EMC and NetApp [Network Appliance Inc.]. Veritas doesn’t want to overturn the apple cart here,” said Gerr. “They’re smart enough to support those deals and keep KVS’ momentum going.”

In addition, Gerr said Veritas’ acquisition of KVS leads to the potential of Veritas more aggressively moving in a content management direction.

Check out eWEEK.com’s Storage Center for the latest news, reviews and analysis on enterprise and business storage hardware and software.

Be sure to add our eWEEK.com developer and Web services news feed to your RSS newsreader or My Yahoo page