Email archiving specialist KVS, which counts Air New Zealand among its customers, has been bought by Veritas.
Veritas announced last week it had bought KVS (which stands for Knowledge Vault Software) for $US225 million and Veritas Australia–New Zealand managing director Bruce Lakin says none of KVS' Australian staff will be leaving as a result of the buy.
"There are no plans to let anyone go."
KVS' Enterprise Vault product provides policy-based archiving for emails, attachments and files stored in Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, Office and Windows file systems and Veritas' acquisition of KVS is being seen as a response to regulatory requirements in the US that demand emails and files be archived securely and easily retrievable.
Veritas will end its own DLM (data lifecycle management) product next year and roll Evault into the space DLM occupied.
Gartner Australia analyst Phil Sargeant says the move is "very positive" for Veritas and that KVS is "a much better solution for Veritas than DLM.
"I'd say Veritas probably had one of the weaker offerings in that space and this will strengthen it."
With KVS, Veritas "will be in a better position to compete with Information Lifecycle management-type vendors such as EMC."
Veritas faces challenges with KVS, namely migrating its DLM customers, Sargeant says.
"They'll have to offer incentives and KVS doesn't do Unix, so they'll have to work towards porting it to Unix and we believe they'll do that in 2006.
"They have to have a Unix offering and it's not a huge challenge."
Evault will be renamed Veritas Enterprise Vault and the acquisition may alter the competitive landscape in email archiving, as KVS' biggest customer is EMC, which sells Enterprise Vault on its Centera storage product.
EMC also offers an ASP-based email archiving service in partnership with Equant, using EMC's Legato EmailXtender and EmailXaminer products.
Earlier this year, KVS signed a reseller agreement with Computerland, adding to its existing one with Gen-i.
Somewhat fortuitously, KVS Australia–New Zealand Bjorn Engelhardt said at the time "until now we've been working through Gen-i, or Telecom as I suppose we'll have to call it now."