Storage Software Firm Princeton Softech Acquired

Princeton Softech, a developer of software aimed at managing the backup and archiving of relational data, on Wednesday was spun off from its parent company and acquired by two of its investors.

Apax Partners and LLR Partners, two private equity firms specializing in investing in technology companies, jointly paid $16 million to Computer Horizons, the parent company of Princeton, and invested an additional $5 million to fund new product development, said Lisa Cash, president and CEO of Princeton.

The company develops what it calls active-archiving technology. Active archiving is aimed at the storage of relational data, such as that generated by the Oracle or IBM DB2 databases.

Cash said data is generally stored on hard drives or tape as flat files, such as text documents. However, databases and similar application access relational data. If that relational data is copied outside the database, for instance if it is backed up to tape, the relations are lost. Such databases are normally backed up by putting full copies of the databases in ever-more-numerous storage devices, but the cost of the hardware and especially the cost of managing the hardware is increasing, she said.

Also, since old data cannot be removed from the system and archived for future access, the increasing size of databases affects system performance, she said.

"Our value proposition is that we help make the most of the [storage environment you already have," Cash said.

Princeton late last year launched a partner program for its database active-archiving software. The new funding from the investors will be used to develop new products aimed at archiving PeopleSoft data. "We will be looking for new partners for that as well," said Cash.