The insatiable beast that is EMC's mergers and acquisition department has fed again - this time gorging itself on Captiva Software.

EMC will shell out close to $275m in cash for the "input management solutions" company. Input management solutions? Yes, we were curious too. As it turns out, Captiva's software can pull data from paper records, digitize it and then help store and manage the information.

"Captiva focuses on the early stages of information lifecycle management - information capture, digitization and categorization," EMC said. "Together, Captiva and EMC enable customers to either eliminate paper or automate its digital capture and integrate the information with electronic business processing for competitive advantage."

Captiva has been in business since 1989 and worked with EMC over the past ten years. It claims particularly prominent financial services and health care customers such as Prudential, Cigna and BlueCross BlueShield.

In its most recent financial report, Captiva reported revenue of $20.2m - a record for the second quarter and a 20 per cent year-over-year rise.

The company will slot into EMC's massive list of recent M&A victims, including VMware, Documentum, Legato, SMARTS, Dantz and, well, we forget who else.

Captiva makes a wide variety of products for both client and data center use. You can have a look at the applications here.

Overall, this buy clearly adds to EMC's strategy of managing all types of information in all its glorious forms. Structured? Unstructured? On a Post-It note? It doesn't matter. EMC will shove it on some disk. ®