EMC continues its shopping spree

Continuing its multiyear shopping spree of software vendors, EMC said Tuesday it will acquire data-replication and protection software company Kashya for about $153 million in cash.

The acquisition is part of EMC's ongoing efforts to expand from a storage hardware provider into a one-stop shop for storing, managing, accessing and securing data throughout the enterprise, or what EMC calls ILM (information lifecycle management). The company has said it is looking to drive ILM development both in-house and through acquisitions. It is interested particularly in model-based resource management, information security and virtualization.

EMC will integrate Kashya into its software group, which is headed by David DeWalt, formerly president and chief executive officer of content management software provider Documentum, which EMC bought for $1.7 billion in late 2003.

More specifically, EMC will combine Kashya’s replication software with EMC's Invista network-based block storage virtualization technology. Invista is an out-of-band appliance built on a dual-node server cluster that connects to a Fibre Channel switch within a storage area network. It competes with such products as IBM's SAN Volume Controller.

EMC will also use Kashya's CDP (continuous data protection) technology as the engine for EMC's RecoverPoint CDP software. CDP technology backs up enterprise data whenever changes are made so that in the case of a file corruption, the most recent, clean copy of a file can be recovered. It is still seen as a maturing technology, but is on the radar for businesses with stringent data loss requirements for such purposes as regulatory compliance.

Kashya is located in San Jose, California, and operates research and development facilities in Ramat Gan, Israel, which will form the core of EMC's Israeli software development center.

EMC does not expect the acquisition to have a significant impact on revenue and earnings per share for 2006.