EMC bolsters information life-cycle management strategy by acquisition
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 2/1/2006 12:00:00 AM
Some recent acquisitions are helping EMC Corp. fulfill its objective to be known as more than a supplier of data storage products.
Two deals were announced in the fall of 2005. One brought EMC a set of applications that allows for central management and enterprisewide sharing of information such as ERP reports. The other netted a solution that can capture data from multiple sources and put it into a standard format before transferring it to a content management system.
The data-sharing solutions came from a company called Acartus, which EMC purchased in October 2005; the content management package came with the acquisition of Captiva in November 2005.
These moves follow a strategy EMC launched in 2003 to assemble a portfolio of solutions that would not only let users store data, but also manage it in a way that supports their business goals. The acquisition of Legato, a supplier of software for backing up and recovering data such as e-mail, was the first move in that direction. That deal was followed quickly by the purchase of content management vendor Documentum.
"These acquisitions give our customers the wherewithal for a more holistic approach to information archiving," says Whitney Tidmarsh, a VP with EMC's Enterprise Software Group.
With the Acartus solution, she says, companies can centrally manage and distribute system-generated reports and other output rather than hold it in isolated repositories. With Captiva, users can digitally capture documents, classify them, and route them for archiving. "Captiva also has a 10-year partnership with Documentum, so the software already is integrated with ours."
Tidmarsh says Captiva and EMC have many joint customers. One of them is Monsanto, a St. Louis-based manufacturer of products for the food and pharmaceutical industries. Monsanto uses the Captiva solution in Europe to capture paper documents generated during its production processes. The Captiva solution digitizes those documents in a standard format and transmits them to the EMC Documentum program for centralized management.
Jim Murphy, a director with Boston-based AMR Research, says EMC's acquisitions since 2003 have moved it "up the stack" from a data-center focus toward what is known as information life-cycle management (ILM). At the same time, he says, regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act have generated interest in ILM because of the need to better manage and quickly retrieve information as part of compliance.
Says Murphy, "The software acquisitions have better positioned EMC to speak to business issues rather than just IT data-center issues."
