Rocket Software Buys the Assets of Arkivio
January 14, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Rocket Software is a hungry software company these days, and has made another acquisition after gobbling up NetManage for $69 million only a few weeks ago. Last week, Rocket Software announced that it had picked up the assets of a privately held information lifecycle management (ILM) software maker named Arkivio for an undisclosed sum. Arkivio, which is not just some made-up buzzword but Italian for “archive,” was founded in December 2000 after four former executives from a company that made network attached storage called Creative Design Solutions was bought by then-relatively healthy disk maker Maxtor a year earlier. (Maxtor was acquired by rival disk maker Seagate Technology for $1.9 billion in December 2005.) Arkivio’s first product, called Auto-Stor, became available in September 2002, and Arkivio raked in $12.5 million in venture capital funding to get the product out the door. The interesting thing about Arkivio’s storage management products is that it was able to sort files by their metadata, allowing for tighter control of access to information–a necessity in any business or government agency with compliance issues. The products could also be used to migrate files between different disk arrays in a hierarchical setup using a mix of high performance, low capacity and high capacity and low performance arrays. Data was automatically moved across disk arrays based on policies, hence the name Auto-Stor. Rocket Software owns a number of mainframe system tools, including hierarchical management software sold under the brand name Mainstar, and also owns Seagull Software, which it acquired for $55.7 million in December 2006. The company sells a number of products on an OEM basis to Hewlett-Packard, EMC, and CA as well, and will probably be keen on maintaining Arkivio’s relationships with network storage maker Network Appliance and further building on Arkivio’s own relationship with CA. Rocket Software also has a data archiving product called Servergraph, and the Arkivio products are going to be tucked into this unit. Both the Mainstar and Servergraph product lines came through acquisitions, and Rocket Software has maintained their separate identities. Rocket Software also shelled out an estimated $20 million in May 2007 to buy a tier-two business intelligence and business performance management software maker called CorVu, which is also being run as a separate business unit, too. Giovanni Paliska, one of Arkivio’s founders and its chief executive officer before Rocket Software bought its assets in December, will be tapped as general manager of the Arkivio business and, according to a company statement, will focus on the core OEM business Arkivio has developed. Rocket Software bought the assets of the company, including its intellectual property, its brands, and its Web site, and staff from Arkivio’s Mountain View, California, offices will continue to develop and support the products. Rocket Software added in its statement announcing the deal that it had no plans to change prices for software or support in the wake of the acquisition–something that new owners of struggling software companies are sometimes tempted to do. RELATED STORIES Rocket Software Buys NetManage for $69 Million Rocket Software Inks Deal to Buy Seagull Software
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