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Overland Captures Okapi: Page 2 of 3

As part of the deal, Matze will come on board as Overland's CTO. Four of Okapi's six employees have already moved over to Overland as well, Cloyd says. Those employees, who will work in technology, marketing, and sales at Overland, are now based in Overland's headquarters, only 20 minutes south of Matze's house in Poway, Calif., where Okapi was based. (The house was not part of the acquisition.)

Okapi, which did not disclose the amount of its funding, was formed in early 2002 and backed by private investment with the majority of its capital ponied up by Matze, a former Veritas Software Corp. (Nasdaq: VRTS) engineer who briefly served as CTO of iSCSI router startup StoneFly Networks Inc. (see StoneFly Loses a Wing).

One of the sillier gimmicks Okapi tried in the course of its very brief lifespan was a USB key chain that displayed the iSCSI protocol stack. Now if it had been a whistle key chain... that would have been something else!

The concept of storing backup or archive data on low-cost ATA disk drives has rapidly gained momentum, with disk and tape vendors alike clambering for a piece of the action (see ADIC Sticks In Some Disk, Disk Backup's a Red-Hot Idea, and our report on Disk Backup 101).

For Overland, putting on the disk-based stripes of Okapi (a relative of the giraffe native to western Africa) is in line with the company's professed strategy of moving beyond being simply a tape vendor. Last year, the company entered the storage software market by licensing storage resource management software from Astrum Software, which was recently purchased by EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) (see Overland Takes Software Route and EMC Sucks Up Astrum).