Veritas buys UK firm
Published: 31 Aug 2004 16:45 BST
Veritas Software announced on Tuesday that it plans to acquire KVault Software, in a move designed to expand its email storage and archiving offerings.
Under the deal, Veritas will pay $225m (£125m) in cash for privately held KVault, or KVS. The Reading, England-based company sells software for storing and managing email, functions that are gaining importance in corporate America, as regulatory changes force businesses to store many kinds of data, including email, and make sure that it can be easily retrieved.
"With growing regulatory requirements, customers need solutions that allow them to quickly discover specific information, whether it's in email 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," Gary Bloom, Veritas' chief executive, said in a statement.
KVS' tools archive information that resides within Microsoft Exchange, Outlook, SharePoint and file systems.
The deal is expected to close by the end of September. KVS' 200 employees and management will operate as a separate unit of Veritas.
The KVS acquisition is important for Veritas; in June of last year, the company unveiled its Veritas Edition for Microsoft Exchange 2000. That technology was designed to provide customers with a one-step means of protecting email from virus problems or data corruption, and for recovering email. The acquisition of KVS will help Veritas expand its efforts.
"This allows them to leapfrog into email retrieve by acquiring the No. 1 leader in the space," said Ken Kiarash, an analyst with Buckingham Research.
According to a study commissioned last year by Veritas, the need for email storage technology is great. Dynamic Markets, which conducted the study, said that 46 percent of chief information officers surveyed would have difficulty retrieving a particular email if it were requested. And while 92 percent of those surveyed said they had the ability to retrieve emails, only 18 percent had the ability to retrieve emails older than a year, according to the report.
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