StorageTek Taps IXOS to Keep Pace in ILM Race

Storage Technology (StorageTek) today announced it has teamed with enterprise content management (ECM) player IXOS Software in a strategic alliance to add IXOS’ e-mail archiving software into its own archive and content management suite.

The company also plans to resell the German company’s ECM software with its own storage management software.

For Louisville, Colo.-based StorageTek, the agreement effectively bolsters its strategy for ILM, or the cradle-to-grave data management that fuses storage management software with ECM solutions, helping the company keep pace with ILM rivals EMC , Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) , HP , and VERITAS Software .

The pact could also help raise the profile of IXOS — already in the spotlight following Open Text’s move to acquire it last month — even higher. IXOS’ e-mail archiving software, which competes with solutions from EMC’s Legato Software unit, features more than 500,000 installed seats.

At first blush, the agreement resembles another pact that IXOS inked with HDS last week, which will provide message archiving support for the storage systems vendor’s march into ILM.

Financial terms of the deal were not made public, but the companies stated IXOS will help StorageTek provide customers with the IXOS-eCONserver for Exchange and IXOS-eCONserver for Lotus as part of StorageTek’s Email Xcelerator series of solutions, which manage large e-mail systems by freeing up storage space on e-mail servers while making sure the messages remain accessible.

This new suite of solutions — the StorageTek Email ArchiveMaster, Email ArchiveMaster with search and retrieve capability, and Email AuditMaster — will address the three main management issues related to e-mail, including data archiving knowledge management and compliance.

StorageTek may resell the IXOS-eCON Solution Suite, which manages documents and data across the enterprise, including groupware, enterprise content, and
e-mail archives. This combined IXOS-StorageTek product will make it possible for companies to retain an archive of e-mail for a fixed period of time, helping them comply with regulatory requirements as mandated by Sarbanes-Oxley and SEC regulations such as 17a-4, which require that e-mails not be deleted or altered for upwards of 20 years.

StorageTek and IXOS have already integrated the StorageTek Application Storage Manager (ASM) for Unix with the e-mail solution suite, including Email ArchiveMaster and Email AuditMaster.

StorageTek will ultimately offer its customers a complete ECM solution that includes its own portfolio of archive and content management software, storage devices, professional services to implement the proper infrastructure, and the IXOS-eCON Solution Suite, a platform that manages business documents in SAP, Siebel, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server, and Lotus Notes environments, as well as custom applications.

StorageTek will offer an ECM solution that enables customers to create, manage, and distribute Web content.

Angel Garcia, StorageTek corporate vice president of Global Services and International Operations, said his company’s goal is to provide “one-stop shopping for data and document management,” so that customers don’t need to pick up point solutions from several vendors.

Story courtesy of Internet News.

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