EMC Acquires Acartus

EMC Corp. recently acquired Acartus, which EMC Software President Dave DeWalt said is a key to its strategy of providing a holistic set of archiving policies and access tools for all information.

DeWalt touted the acquisition Tuesday in Las Vegas, during Momentum 2005, the year's largest gathering of EMC Documentum business partners and customers. During the conference's opening keynote address, he outlined the company's strategy for a crowd of about 2,500 people.

DeWalt said that customers will be able to archive and retrieve information faster, while reducing risk and cost through EMC's common archiving strategy.

Acartus, a privately held company base in Fort Collins, Colo., creates software that allows customers to capture, manage, distribute and archive large amounts of computer-generated output like ERP system reports, invoices, statements, billings, transactional summaries and general ledger balance journals. It is integrated with EMC Documentum software and EMC Centera content-addressed storage platforms.

DeWalt said the acquisition of Acartus does for EMC's electronic fixed content archiving what last week's $275 million acquisition of Captiva will do for extending capabilities with paper-based information.

"With the growing convergence of enterprise report management and enterprise content management, and the key role Acartus software will play in our future direction, the time was right to advance this partnership to the next level," DeWalt said in a prepared statement.

DeWalt said that EMC's common archiving strategy will eliminate the complexity of disconnected archiving silos while improving companies' ability to quickly respond to legal and other inquiries.

EMC has had a long-standing partner relationship with Acartus. The companies have not disclosed the terms of the acquisition.