Legato Unites Storage, Content Technologies

That's the message company executives brought to solution providers at Legato's annual partner conference, held here last month.

Instead, the company is pushing to integrate its classic data storage software line with the content management technology it acquired last year when it purchased OTG Software and enhance the mix with the addition of messaging archiving.

Solution providers praised Legato for bringing together the different technologies.

Partners have been getting excited about the integration of the storage and content sides, said Vincent Brunetti, executive vice president at RVM, a New York-based solution provider serving the financial and litigation markets that previously worked with OTG. "Legato is not just content, or just storage," Brunetti said. "Legato is seamless content and storage."

While RVM has been interested in adding storage to its content management practice, it didn't integrate the two technologies in the past because the tools weren't available, Brunetti said. "But now, when we go into a potential sale, we can look at all the issues," he said. "Before, we had a content solution. Now we can offer the whole solution."

Brunetti also cited Legato's e-mail archival products as another way to tie storage to other critical business processes. "A lot of people are proactively looking for what e-mails they can find for litigation," he said. "With Legato's emailXtender, they are archived all the time. And it allows purging of junk e-mail.

"We don't just offer the e-mail piece to customers. We sell the storage piece as well," Brunetti said.

Integrating storage management with content management allows both technologies to leverage each other, said Arsenio Batoy, president of Optical Laser, a value-added distributor in Huntington Beach, Calif.

While storage requirements have continued to grow, the amount of data generated by e-mail and fixed content has boomed, Batoy said. As a result, companies that can bring together the two technologies can do well, especially if they have a track record of providing outsourced services.

Complete integration of content management and storage management technologies within Legato's product offering is still one or two years away, Legato executives said. The company plans to bring them together gradually and introduce channel programs to help partners get more involved, they said.

Rob Simonds, vice president of worldwide sales operations at Legato, said that in the next month or so, the company plans to unveil the parameters of a channel program related to e-mail archival. The program will have three major segments, including government-mandated regulatory compliance, corporate governance and storage management. "It fits very nicely with our partners currently involved with storage management," Simonds said.