Connected Gets Into Archive

Connected Corp.will reach across the Atlantic Ocean to become a player in the hot email archiving field when it purchases U.K.-based Archive-it next week.

Connected and Archive-it are privately owned, and Connected's CEO Bob Brennan isnt disclosing financial terms of the acquisition, saying only that the purchase price was "a few million" and the overall investment in the new product line will be in the "low to moderate eight figures.” That includes the cost of moving Archive-it’s small workforce (fewer than 20 employees) to the United States.

The acquisition will make Connected the latest storage software company to jump into the information lifecycle management (ILM) space. ILM – the ability to automatically move data from one type of storage to another as its value and importance to the company shifts over time – is gaining momentum, as companies deal with the need to comply with government data storage and archiving regulations, as well as rapidly growing email stores.

Archive-it’s email archiving software, dubbed MailStore, was designed to fit the needs of legal discovery teams looking for evidence in a company's or individual's email. Connected specializes in automated data protection and recovery software, and it plans to integrate MailStore in its wares as early as this year.

Connected plans a new version of MailStore, called Connected ArchiveStore/EM, for release late this year or early first quarter 2004. Connected DataProtector/SV (for servers) will follow, with limited beta release in the first half of 2004; Connected DataProtector/PC 7.5 (for workstations) is also scheduled for release during this timeframe. Connected Total Control, which will integrate all of these products under a common management console, will follow later in 2004.“Customers asked us to do this. Our financial services customers are pounding the table because of compliance. Other customers, like technology companies, are pounding the table because the email monster is out of control," says Brennan. "We want to protect all distributed data.”

Connected is taking on new competitors with the acquisition. Connected already competes with companies such as Veritas Software Corp. (Nasdaq: VRTS) and Computer Associates International Inc. (NYSE: CA)on the data archiving and recovery front. After buying Archive-it, Connected will compete in email archiving with KVS Inc. and IXOS Software (Nasdaq: XOSY).

Germany-based IXOS recently announced partnerships with Storage Technology Corp. (StorageTek) (NYSE: STK), Hitachi Ltd. (NYSE: HIT; Paris: PHA), IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), and Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) to gain traction in the U.S. (see StorageTek Adds More ILM).

EMC’s recent acquisition of backup and archiving software company Legato Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: LGTO) and enterprise content management software maker Documentum Inc., and Network Appliance Inc.’s purchase of Spinnaker Networks Inc. also highlight activities in the archiving and ILM markets (see EMC Gobbles Legato, EMC Cops Documentum, NetApp Annexes Spinnaker, HDS Expands Software, Services, and HP Debuts ILM Strategy).

Brennan's not fazed by the growing crowd of ILM Players. Connected has its own partnerships with HP, Dell Computer Corp. (Nasdaq: DELL), EMC, and NetAppliance, he says, and he's confident in the technology he's gaining.— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch