Veritas Acquires KVS, Gains E-Mail Archiving Capabilities

Veritas Software is expanding its ability to move and archive data in a world increasingly concerned with regulatory and compliance issues with Tuesday's acquisition of KVault Software (KVS), a leading E-mail archiving software developer.

The acquisition, which is an all-cash transaction valued at about $225 million, brings to Veritas KVS's Enterprise Vault, a software application that allows archiving of business-critical information held within Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Office, and file systems.

The software indexes the data to help ease later search and discovery, and can help automate the discovery of data for regulatory purposes.

KVS is based in the United Kingdom, with U.S. headquarters in Arlington, Texas.

The acquisition is Veritas' fifth in the past 21 months.

In early July, Veritas spent $35 million to acquire Invio Software, a privately held developer of IT process automation technology. In January, it acquired Ejasent, a developer of software that allows applications to be moved from server to server without disruption.

Other acquisitions include Precise Software, whose i3 technology monitors application performance, and Jareva Technologies, whose OpForce technology automates server deployment.

"By helping improve the availability and performance of Microsoft Exchange and driving down storage costs, KVS will add another strategic component to the Veritas utility computing portfolio," said Gary Bloom, chairman, president, and CEO of Veritas, in a statement. "With growing regulatory requirements, customers need solutions that allow them to quickly discover specific information, whether it's in E-mail or personal documents. With the addition of KVS, we can deliver customers the market-leading software for storing, managing, backing up, and archiving all their information." E-mail archiving has become an important part of the storage-management offerings of most major storage vendors. In the past year or so, several have unveiled original equipment manufacturer or reseller relationships with developers of E-mail archiving software.

One of the key reasons Veritas archrival EMC Corp. acquired Legato last year was for the latter's E-mail archiving capabilities.

KVS is one of several software developers that has developed products that interface with EMC's Centera content-addressable storage arrays. Such arrays are aimed at providing noneditable, not-deletable long-term storage of data for regulatory and compliance purposes.

Veritas' executives say the acquisition of KVS is expected to close next month.