EMC To VARs: Get Unified

EMC this week is bringing several different data archiving technologies together with a single repository, one it hopes will spur VARs to partner with it on the software side.

EMC, Hopkinton, Mass., is creating a unified archiving platform that takes advantage of technology from a number of its software acquisitions of the past couple years. The platforms include e-mail archiving from Legato, document imaging from Captiva, report archiving from Acartus, and document management from Documentum, said Lubor Ptacek, director of product marketing at EMC.

Central to the platform is the EMC Documentum repository, an architecture designed to store and manage a wide range of unstructured data, such as documents, Web content, rich media and documents.

Under the platform, e-mails from applications such as Windows Exchange and Lotus Notes can be captured by Legato emailXtender and automatically placed in the repository, Ptacek said. The same thing will happen to documents scanned and captured by EMC’s Captiva technology, and to reports generated by applications such as SAP and Oracle and captured electronically by EMC’s Acartus technology. Once those files are in the repository, customers will be able to manage them all with a single user interface and find the specific content they need with EMC’s Discovery Manager, Ptacek said.

The unified archiving platform is being driven primarily by compliance and government regulations, which are requiring companies to be able to store important content for long periods of time for future retrieval if needed, Ptacek said. “Also, archiving is becoming an active piece of IT infrastructure,” he said. “Customers can use it to find projects from five years ago. With classic passive archiving, they would have to go through a closetful of tapes.”

EMC is moving to bring the channel, especially legacy emailXtender partners, into this space with a new training program, he said.

Richard Boccinfuso, CTO and vice president of business development at MTI, Irvine, Calif., said putting that content into a single repository provides end users with a lot of flexibility. MTI is looking forward to working with the EMC Documentum repository soon, he said. “It will provide a services play for us,” he said.