CA Buys Storage Software Startup

Shtilman said that the four products have a good fit in the CA product line. For instance, Shtilman said, XOsoft's WANSyncCD helps customers consolidate data into a central location, and is closely related to the backup software that CA provides. The Enterprise Rewinder CDP application also compliments CA's backup software. "It works with different backup software, not instead," he said.

XOsoft's Enterprise Rewinder was one of the industry's first CDP applications, and currently is in use by hundreds of customers, Shtilman said. He also said that XOsoft and CA had already started field testing XOsoft's WANSyncHA application with CA at customer sites.

Davis said that CA currently does not offer any of these technologies to its customers.

However, he said that could change. CA plans to start by offering the XOsoft applications as stand-alone applications to its channel, and move toward integrating applications. For instance, one early move would be to automatically start a backup if a high availability event occurred.

Eventually, over the next two years, CA will merge the technologies into a next-generation recovery management platform, Davis said. "We will be driving a policy-based recovery management strategy," he said.

XOsoft's distribution channels will be integrated into CA's, but XOsoft will not lose a distributor as a result, said Davis.

Storage products represent a higher percentage of indirect sales for CA - 40 percent - than the percentage of overall indirect sales from all product lines, which stands at 10 percent, said Davis, who added he saw no reason for legacy XOsoft partners to be concerned about competition from legacy CA partners peddling the more comprehensive BrightStor ARCserve Backup product line. XOsoft partners will be encouraged to expand their partnerships with CA into the product line, he said.

"XOsoft has great technology for business continuity, and will add depth to the CA product set," Rentech's Nelson said. "And it's good for us in the data center. CA has a suite of products for backup and monitoring. The acquisition gives us access to a more complete set of products and solutions."

Rentech provides XOsoft's WANSyncHA application as a service to midrange and enterprise clients on a licensing basis with XOsoft as part of a full line of services including co-location, dedicated servers, firewalls, storage, backup, and operating system and hardware support, Nelson said.

XOsoft is headquartered in Waltham, Mass., with offices in New York, California and Israel.