Veritas Archives Another Startup

Symantec Corp.s (Nasdaq: SYMC) pending acquisition of Veritas Software Corp. (Nasdaq: VRTS) hasn’t dampened Veritas’s appetite for buying companies. While waiting for the Symantec deal to close, Veritas quietly bought DataCenter Technologies Inc. (DCT), a Belgium-based archiving software startup.

Veritas did not respond to inquiries about the deal, but sources say it was completed at least two weeks ago, and engineers from DataCenter attended the Veritas Vision user show in San Francisco this week as Veritas employees.

DataCenter gives Veritas products to tap into the compliance market, which IDC forecasts will generate more than $20 billion in IT spending by 2009 (see IDC: Compliance Market to Pass $20B).

DataCenter late last year released DC-Protect, a software-only version of its archiving appliance. DC-Protect reduces backup time and network traffic by separating metadata from the content of each file in the storage pool. DataCenter’s other product, Content Director, archives content-addressed storage (CAS) or fixed content -- documents that will not change once they are stored.

It’s not certain how Veritas will integrate the new technology, but it has several options. Taneja Group

analyst Brad O’Neill speculates Veritas can use DataCenter’s software as a competitor to online backup vendor Avamar Inc., or to compete with CAS products from EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ), and startups Archivas Inc. and Permabit Inc.Another industry source says Veritas can integrate the software with its replication and backup software to help companies retain data to meet compliance regulations.

“My guess is they’ll use it for distributed backups and to back up data to remote offices,” O’Neill says. “It also gives them CAS-based architecture to compete with [EMC’s] Centerra, if that’s what they want to do with it.”

The archiving space has been busy in recent months. Earlier this year, Storage Technology Corp. (StorageTek) (NYSE: STK) entered into an OEM deal with Permabit, and disk vendor Nexsan Technologies Inc.

acquired startup EverTrust to develop an archiving product (see StorageTek Taps Permabit's CAS Act and Nexsan Targets CAS Startup).

A source close to DataCenter Technologies says CEO Peter Shambora did not join Veritas, but the startup’s engineering team has. “The technical team is still on board, and they’re out at Veritas Vision,” the source says.

Veritas has been a frequent shopper on the acquisition front, adding Ejasent, Jareva, KVS, Precise, and other startups to its fold in recent years (see Veritas Nabs Ejasent, Veritas to Acquire Precise, Jareva, and No Brainer: Veritas Buys KVS). At the Storage Networking World conference earlier this month, Symantec CEO John Thompson said he hoped to close the $13.5 billion acquisition of Veritas by the end of next month but said the combined company would continue to buy smaller storage and security firms (see Symantec CEO Opens Roadmap).— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch