CA Annexes XOsoft

CA continued its data management acquisition spree on Tuesday, picking up continuous data protection (CDP) and replication specialist XOsoft for an undisclosed sum.

The acquisition follows last month’s buy of records management firm MDY Group.

“They’ve made some very sharp buys,” said Enterprise Management Associates senior analyst Mike Karp. “They’re buying companies that have good specific products that fit very nicely into their portfolio.”

XOsoft will “dovetail very nicely” with CA’s BrightStor ARCserve Backup products, Karp said.

Seven-year-old XOsoft boasts 1,600 customers. Its products are so easy to use that the company has visited less than 10 percent of its customers, Karp said.

XOsoft’s products provide uninterrupted access to all types of file and application servers, including Windows Servers, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL, Microsoft IIS and Oracle, and allow instantaneous recovery from disaster. CA plans to integrate XOsoft’s products with ARCserve Backup to deliver a complete solution for protecting and recovering critical applications. CA also will develop a next-generation information protection platform to unify and simplify recovery operations.

Leonid Shtilman, CEO and founder of XOsoft, will join CA as senior vice president of storage management software.

Greg Schulz, founder and senior analyst at StorageIO, said data protection in general has been a hot area of late, with EMC acquiring Kashya and RSA and HDS partnering with Diligent and Archivas.

“Coupled with other recent CA acquisitions and partnerships, it will be interesting to see what CA can put together and deliver, and how it will be adopted by the customer base moving forward,” said Schulz.

Opsware Collects Creekpath

Also on the acquisition trail Tuesday was Opsware, which plans to buy storage management software firm Creekpath Systems.

Opsware said it will build on Creekpath’s technology as the foundation for its application storage automation solution slated for early next year. Opsware said it will be the first to integrate the automation of servers, networks and storage to provide management from an application perspective instead of at the infrastructure level. Opsware will pay about $10 million in cash, with a maximum potential earnout of an additional $5 million in cash.

Opsware plans to close Creekpath’s Boulder, Colorado-based facilities and relocate personnel to Opsware’s offices in Redmond, Washington. Opsware does not expect to sell the current Acuity offering from Creekpath.

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