Storage is a key piece of the information lifecycle management (ILM) puzzle, with several established companies in the space. The major storage vendors have been expanding into other areas of ILM—management software and security tools, for example—through acquisitions and homegrown products. But many areas are still held by niche players, with plenty of room for innovative upstarts as well. Here are some of the names to know, and their current claims to ILM fame.
The Big Players:
EMC
has been expanding its reach into every corner of the ILM market. Beginning with its 2003 acquisition of content management system provider Documentum,
EMC
has added companies including Infoscape (information risk management software),
RSA
Security (information security) and Berkeley Data Systems (managed backup).
IBM
branched into content management with its 2006 acquisition of FileNet, and has been beefing up its storage disk and tape systems with new options for customers of all sizes. Big Blue has also been upgrading its offerings in storage virtualization, an area rich in promise for storage savings, according to experts.
IBM
bought data management software maker DataMirror this past July.
Hewlett-Packard, meanwhile, recently rolled out a key manager to centralize data encryption control. It also acquired datacenter automation specialist Opsware last summer. Microsoft obviously had a big hand in the creation of all the unstructured data that needs to be stored these days. The vendor’s SharePoint document-management platform, which puts some of the structure back in, has become extremely popular. Microsoft also launched an enterprise storage division four years ago.
Interesting Smaller Players: FileNet and Documentum now belong to the big guys, but Open Text remains independent in the content management software space. So many end users need better data-classification options that it’s probably not surprising that a large number of companies are jockeying for the market’s attention. They include Abrevity, Arkivio, Kazeon, StoredIQ, Index Engines, Njini and Scentric. In backing up and restoring corporate data, Asempra is a young company that has caught the eye of the ILM specialists at
IBM
and HP.
In e-discovery, companies include Fios, StoredIQ and Zantaz; Last fall
Iron
Mountain
unveiled plans to buy e-discovery services provider Stratify for $158 million. Companies like Global Relay, which grew up building e-mail archiving and retrieval solutions for Wall Street, are now looking to bullet-proof e-mail for a broader range of end users.
