Content archiving pioneer Zantaz is being acquired by enterprise search company Autonomy Corp. for $375 million.
Pleasanton, Calif.-based Zantaz is ranked number two in the e-mail archiving market by IDC, behind Symantec’s KVS unit. The company boasts more than $100 million in annual sales and is growing at 23 percent annually, operating at breakeven, according to company officials on a conference call this morning. Zantaz has more than 500 employees and 1,000 customers for its archiving and e-discovery products, including nine of the top 10 global law firms and many of the biggest corporations and financial firms.
UK-based Autonomy is growing even faster, with 161 percent sales growth last year. The combined sales of the new company will be more than $400 million.
Autonomy’s IDOL software is already used in Zantaz products. Together, the two say they will “redefine information risk management by proactively automating the full spectrum of consolidated archiving, e-discovery, analytics and real-time policy management uniquely in one system.”
Information will be “simultaneously available in operational systems and consolidated archives, allowing rapid e-discovery and analytics to be run seamlessly across all information sources using advanced methods such as conceptual search, clustering and alerting.”
Autonomy CEO Michael Lynch said the combined solution “will be unique in offering our existing 17,000 customers end-to-end information-rich risk management solutions — from hosted archiving to e-discovery, compliance, real-time governance and archive analytics — in one consolidated platform, including information from documents to applications and voice and video.”
IDC Storage Software Research Director Laura DuBois said the deal “is reflective of market convergence between several different adjacent markets — search/index, classification, archiving, content management — all these technologies are converging to serve the needs of compliance, governance and legal electronic discovery requirements.”
Zantaz was already an OEM of Autonomy technology, and competing archiving products also use Autonomy technology, DuBois said. Zantaz’s content archiving and electronic discovery businesses are both relevant to Autonomy, she said, and Zantaz has a software as a service (SaaS) model which Autonomy should also benefit from. Zantaz’s content archiving business alone did about $107 million in revenues last year, she said.
Zantaz CEO Steve King will remain in charge of Autonomy’s Zantaz division. The deal is expected to close in August.
In other deal news today, Crossroads Systems announced the acquisition of Grau Data Storage’s FileMigrator Agent hierarchical storage management (HSM) system.
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