IBM Jan. 29 said it has agreed to acquire privately held Softek Storage Solutions, of Vienna, Va., to bolster the offerings within its Global Technology Services group. The purchase price was not disclosed.
Softek, a hosted data migration provider, founded in April 2000 as a subsidiary of the former Amdahl, provides software and services that enable enterprises to move any amount of data from one location to another outside the application layer and across any storage platform or distance, thus improving speed and quality of the delivery, the company said.
The acquisition of Softek follows a spate of recent IBM acquisitions, including companies such as Internet Security Systems, MRO Software and FileNet.
Softek gives IBM’s services business a functionality it had sought for some time in order to continue to compete with EMC, the world leader in data-storage market share. Softek sells installable software and also provides one-time-only or regular subscription services for handling data movement, depending upon the needs of the customer.
“This helps us to make sure that we have all the tools we need to do all those [data migration] pieces,” Charlie Andrews, director of system storage marketing for IBM, based in Armonk, N.Y., told eWEEK.
