Swooping into the exploding e-mail archiving business, Computer Associates International last week acquired iLumin Software Services.
The acquisition puts CA into the heated message archiving battle with Symantec-Veritas’ KVS group, which provides Microsoft Exchange archiving, and EMC’s Legato/Documentum product set. Terms of the deal with privately held Reston, Va.-based iLumin were not disclosed.
CA CEO John Swainson said the company will move to broaden distribution of iLumin’s products through channel partners.
“ILumin’s customers today have primarily been large enterprises,” he said. “We expect that to continue, but we are also looking at opportunities to take this into our channels where we sell a great amount of storage software with our ARCServe brand. We think this is a natural addition, and we will be looking for opportunities to find ways to make this channel friendly so that we can bring our channel partners this additional capability.”
About 50 percent of iLumin’s current sales go through channel partners, executives said.
Tony Ferrigno, CTO and vice president of business development at Ciber, a Greenwood, Colo., CA enterprise partner, said the deal fills a gap in CA’s BrightStor family. “CA had state-of-the-art backup/recovery, SRM [Storage Resource Manager] and storage portal, but didn’t have an e-mail archiving solution,” he said. Ciber will definitely move to add iLumin to its product set, he added.
CA, Islandia, N.Y., said iLumin will operate as a separate division under the BrightStor group. The company is already moving to integrate the iLumin products with BrightStor ARCServe backup software and is evaluating integration with BrightStor SRM, said Anders Lofgren, senior vice president of BrightStor product management and marketing.
