CA Buys XOSoft for CDP, Replication Software

ComputerWire – 7/12/06

CA Inc has bought itself into CDP, continuous data protection software, with the purchase of privately-held XoSoft Inc, for an undisclosed price.

XOSoft, whose software is developed in Israel, says it has racked up 1,600 customers for the CDP, and long-distance replication software that it launched almost four years ago.

While XOSoft says that many of those customers are SMBs, the product is mostly a mid-market offering. A typical installation costs around $20,000, and XoSoft’s customers include many Fortune 1000 businesses, according to the company’s CEO Leonid Shtilman.

That puts XoSoft’s software in a quite a different category to Symantec Corp’s eponymous CDP Server or Microsoft Corp’s Data Protection Manager, which can be both be installed for less than $1,000.

XoSoft said that also unlike those products, which protect desktop machines and small file servers, its software can be used to provide event-based roll-back for Exchange, SQL Server, Oracle and Blackberry data.

One company whose products might be similar to XoSoft is Kashya Inc, the start-up that EMC Corp bought in May. Like XoSoft, Kashya had integrated its event-based CDP and replication software to Oracle and Microsoft applications, and typically saw its software implemented in multiple data centers. Kashya however did not sell its software in the same volumes as XoSoft. It launched its software in 2003, and by March this year had scored around 200 customers.

CA said the purchase was part of a three-legged storage software plan that will see it cover information management, resource management, and data backup recovery.

“Backup management software isn’t enough any more. We need to flesh it out with failover, replication and CDP,” said Bob Davis, SVP and general manager of CA’s storage division. Davis said that over the last twelve months CA had pointed several customers towards XoSoft.

Last year CA bought email archiving specialist Ilumin Inc, and only last month its bought records management software supplier MDY Group International Inc.

In the short term,XoSoft’s software will be integrated with CA’s ARCserve backup software. Longer term, Davis said that ARCserve might be driven by a policy-based engine that would allow customers to choose between levels of data protection, and would use the output of CA’s record management software as input.