Veritas buys KVS for $225m

Veritas has strengthened an already strong email backup software line by acquiring KVault Software Limited (KVS) to the tune of $225m.

Veritas plans to complete the buy of KVS in September, if standard approvals go through. It will bring on KVS's 200 staffers and management and have the company operate as a separate unit within Veritas. In 2003, KVS pulled in $23m in revenue.

Over the past couple of years, Veritas has made acquisitions mostly to bolster weaker parts of its produce line - namely server management software. That makes the deal with KVS somewhat surprising, since Veritas already touts its extensive PC, server and storage archiving software.

KVS, however, lays claim to more than 1.7m users of its software and is seen as a technology leader in email archiving. Some analysts expect email archiving software revenue to grow at a fierce rate, as companies move to meet regulatory guidelines.

KVS, based in Reading, England, specializes in archiving information stored in Microsoft's Exchange, SharePoint and Office products. Its products are tuned to make indexing and searches easier for these products - a must when the auditor comes knocking.

As a result of the deal, Veritas will stop selling its Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) software, opting for KVS's Evault product instead. Veritas has a relatively small base of users for DLM and its predecessor Storage Migrator. It plans to migrate these customers over to Evault and to support DLM for the next two years. Veritas does have NetBackup Storage Migrator for its Unix customers, but the buy of KVS will leave Linux customers in the lurch for some time to come.

This is one of the larger buys Veritas has made over the past two years. Other acquisitions include Ejasent, Invio, Precise and Jareva. ®

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