CA Acquires Records Management Software Company

The acquisition of MDY follows Islandia, N.Y.-based CA's mid-October acquisition of iLumin Software Services, a developer of technology for email security, archiving, storage management, and data protection, said Bob Davis, general manager of CA's storage business management unit.

"CA has embarked on a strategy for information management that started with the acquisition of iLumin," Davis said. "It gives us touch points beyond. And as we talked to our customers' IT and legal people about compliance, we found that records management is important to them."

MDY has two main products. MDY FileSurf is a U.S. Department of Defense-certified application that automates the electronic and e-mail recordkeeping across an enterprise. MDY Federated MR provides a centralized console and rules engine for enforcing records management strategies across multiple repositories.

Developing common repositories for multiple types of content has become a big move for storage vendors.

Hitachi Data Systems earlier this week unveiled a move to build centralized depositories of content based on its storage arrays using software from Waltham, Mass.-based Archivas.

EMC, meanwhile, in April said it will provide centralized repositories using its Documentum software for content created by a number of other software technologies it has acquired in the past few years.

Galina Datskovsky, CEO of MDY, said that unlike EMC, MDY is not a repository vendor. "There's no need to control the repository," she said. "We just want to control the records. Customers already have repositories from applications like Documentum, Interwoven, Hummingbird, Microsoft SharePoint, or data sitting on a storage drive or in a database. And e-mail depositories, so that makes our new tie with iLumin, which is also a repository, very important."

Datskovsky said MDY's software does not require any "rip and replace" of customers' other applications to use. "We slide over or under the customer's existing repositories," she said. "It can be seamlessly integrated to the customer's software, or transparent to the users."

The MDY value-add is its records management technology, Datskovsky said. "Once something is declared a record, we control its security, classification, discovery, legal hold, retention, and disposal, either by destruction, moving to an archive, or divesting it."

CA has been working to grow its own content management technology through internal development as well as acquisition, and through partnering with other vendors such as Mountain View, Calif.-based Arkivio for file management; Irvine, Calif.-based StoreAge Networking Technologies for SAN virtualization; and Westlake Village, Calif.-based CaminoSoft for hierarchical storage management.

MDY currently has technology partnerships with CA rivals Symantec, a Cupertino, Calif.-based developer of data storage and data archiving software, and Zantaz, a Pleasanton, Calif.-based developer of software for e-mail archiving, compliance and discovery.

Davis said that CA plans to keep those relations after the MDY acquisition. "We want people to buy our e-mail and records management capabilities," he said. "But we also recognize Symantec as a big competitor."

CA did not release financial details of the deal.