EMC Annexes Acartus

EMC on Tuesday announced a broad archiving strategy — and completed it with the acquisition of enterprise report management (ERM) firm Acartus.

At its Momentum 2005 conference in Las Vegas for Documentum business partners and customers, EMC said it plans to offer customers “a holistic set of archiving policies and access tools for all information, regardless of origin, type or location.”

Acartus, based in Fort Collins, Colo., will be a “key element” of EMC’s common information archiving strategy, EMC Software President Dave DeWalt said in the opening keynote address.

Acartus’ software lets customers capture, manage, distribute and archive large volumes of computer-generated output, such as daily ERP system reports, invoices, statements, billings, transactional summaries and general ledger balance journals, driving large-scale archiving requirements. The firm’s report management technology is integrated with the EMC Documentum software and EMC Centera content-addressed storage (CAS) platforms.

DeWalt likened Acartus’ technology to that of Captiva, which EMC acquired last week.

“Much like Captiva does for paper-based information, Acartus extends our capability to address the archiving needs of reports, print streams, statements, bills and other forms of electronic fixed content, which comprise a large portion of all unstructured information,” DeWalt said. “With the growing convergence of enterprise report management and enterprise content management, and the key role Acartus software will play in our future direction, the time was right to advance this partnership to the next level.”

With products from Acartus and Captiva, the newly released EMC Archive Services for SAP and other archiving-related products such as Centera, EMC said it is uniquely positioned to deliver comprehensive archiving for all forms of information.

“Our customers are beginning to recognize information archiving and retention as an essential element of their business processes,” DeWalt said in the keynote. “The explosion in information growth requires robust archive solutions not only to free up primary storage, but also to arm companies with tools to quickly access archived information such as files, images, documents, records, reports, forms, databases and specific enterprise application information.

“Today, much of this information is archived in separate, disconnected systems,” he continued. “The negative business impact of not efficiently and accurately managing, retaining, securing and retrieving this information is measurable. For example, a company’s ability to respond in short order to legal inquiries depends largely on its underlying archive and retrieval systems. For this reason, EMC has embarked on a strategy to eliminate the complexity of disconnected archiving silos.”

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