Rocket Blasts Off With Arkivio

After seven years as a private company, it looks like the end of the road for SRM startup Arkivio, whose assets were acquired by Rocket Software for an undisclosed fee today.

In a statement, Rocket confirmed that it bought Arkivio's software assets early last week, as well as the startup's brand name, logo, and Web address. Rocket will now use Arkivio's software to expand its existing storage business, which includes backup products for IBM DB2, EMC Symmetrix, and Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM).

Precise details of what happened at Arkivio are yet to emerge, although the startup has not been without its problems. In 2003, Howard Silver, the firm's senior vice president of engineering, quit, citing "irreconcilable differences" with the company, which was apparently struggling to find customers and funds.

Arkivio's flagship product is its Auto-Stor data classification product, which it has been touting as a way to manage storage for ILM. The software is certified to work with EMC's Centera CAS platform, and Arkivio has also forged similar deals with Hitachi, NAS vendor Plasmon, and Microsoft acquisition target Fast Search & Transfer.

The Auto-Stor offering is also OEM'd by CA within its BrightStor product line, where it is used for data classification.Rocket confirmed today that it will continue to use the Arkivio name, and a statement on the company's Website confirms its intention to keep the brand alive. "Rocket will continue to use the Arkivio name in the market place," it said.

Rocket has no plans to change the pricing of Arkivio's products, services, and maintenance offerings.

"I think that Arkivio's assets blend nicely with what Rocket Software does," says Anne MacFarland, director of data strategies at analyst firm the Clipper Group. "Arkivio enables tiered storage I think that [being part of Rocket] will be a much easier sell than going it alone."

It also appears that Arkivio's workforce, including R&D, sales, and support, will be moving over to Rocket. Again according to the statement: "Development and support will continue with staff from the current Arkivio location in Mountain View, California, and additional staff from Rocket Software."

The startup's co-founder and CEO Giovanni Paliska will now become general manager of a new Arkivio business unit within Rocket, focusing on developing OEM products. Sales of Arkivio's software to direct customers will be managed by Don Becker, general manager of Rocket's Servergraph backup product.Neither Arkivio nor Rocket responded to calls and email from Byte and Switch today.

Arkivio had a number of big-name customers for its software, including defense giant Raytheon, semiconductor manufacturer Bell Microproducts, and ASP Allegra Systems.

The startup, which competed with NetApp's recent acquisition Onaro, was founded in December 2000 by four former executives of Creative Design Solutions (CDS), a NAS appliance company sold to Maxtor in 1999. Arkivio launched Auto-Stor in 2002, initially targeted at Windows environments, although this was extended to Unix the following year.

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