Symantec Swallows Revivio

To help accelerate development of an enterprise continuous data protection (CDP) product, Symantec bought up the intellectual property and engineering team of struggling CDP pioneer Revivio.

Sean Macnew, director of Symantec's CDP and replication product group, confirmed the deal to Byte and Switch after several industry sources said they heard a deal was brewing. He says Symantec will offer CDP as part of its NetBackup enterprise backup software platform, and will discontinue sales of Revivio's Continuous Protection System (CPS) appliance. (See Revivio Vies for Backup Bucks.)

"One of the reasons we haven't been making a big deal of this is we are not at the stage where we want to unveil specifics of CDP," Macnew says. "We've been looking at CDP for quite a while. We view it as a superior form of data protection. Customers want it as part of NetBackup, not as a point technology."

He says Symantec has been working on developing CDP for NetBackup, but he doesn't expect a product until the second half of 2007. Symantec has near-CDP -- frequent snapshots for files -- as part of its Backup Exec Windows-based backup platform, but lacks continuous protection for applications such as Exchange, Oracle, and SQL Server. (See Microsoft and Symantec Cut SMB Tape.)

Even with Revivio's technology, Symantec finds itself behind backup software rivals EMC, CA, CommVault, and Asigra, which have developed or acquired CDP technology.Sources say Revivio, one of the first CDP vendors to hit the market, would not have survived without the deal. Macnew says Revivio had 12 customers. He says Revivio founder and CTO Michael Rowan and VP of engineering Christopher Rocca will join Symantec with about 10 other engineers. "This is something we pounced on pretty quickly," Macnew says.

Symantec did not disclose the purchase price, but sources say it was around $20 million -- well below the $55 million Revivio brought in from VC funding. (See Revivio Revs Up With $25M.)

Several industry sources say Revivio has been on the block for close to a year, after finding customers reluctant to buy a network-based enterprise appliance from a startup. Unlike its main enterprise pure-play CDP rival Mendocino Software, Revivio tried to sell its product on its own instead of through OEM deals.

Sources say IBM was interested several months back, but decided to back off on enterprise block-based CDP for now. (See Revivio Finds Buddy; Buyer Next? .) IBM sells CDP For Files, a CDP product for PCs and laptops.

The CDP space has seen a flurry of acquisitions and partnerships over the past year or so. EMC gobbled up Kashya, CA bought XOSoft, Network Appliance acquired Alacritus, Atempto picked up Storactive, and SonicWall bought Lasso Logic. Also, Mendocino Software has an OEM deal with Hewlett-Packard, and also had one with EMC before EMC acquired Kashya.Dave Raffo, News Editor, Byte and Switch