News

posted on 08 April 2008 14:24

Serial acquirer EMC has made its fourth and very quiet acquisition of the year, WysDM, a heterogeneous backup reporting supplier.

WysDM is one of a group of data protection management (DPM) vendors, such as Bocada, Servergraph and Aptare, supplying heterogeneous backup reporting tools which tell users whether their backups have taken place, failed en-route, or succeeded.

The reporting tools from backup vendors are limited to reporting on their own products and, in multi-vendor backup shops; the norm in many enterprises, admin staff have to use multiple incompatible and incomplete reporting tools.

Like Aptare, WysDM took the view that its job was to report on data protection activities and not just backup. It reports on snapshots and replication activities as well as backup.

In October last year it added disk array utilisation, WysDM for Disks, to its repertoire, following Aptare, suggesting a small step towards storage resource management.

The fit with EMC is obvious as EMC lacks a generic data protection reporting capability of its own. It uses WysDM as the OEM source for EMC Backup Advisor and NetWorker Dashboard however.

WysDM is a 40-person, privately-held firm, led by CEO Alan Atkinson. The 40 people will be put in EMC's Information Management Software Group, with Atkinson reporting to IMSG SVP Mark Sorenson.

What EMC wants to do is to collect data protection activity and state data, analyse it, predict protection gaps, and report on every aspect of a user's data protection infrastructure. WysDM will probably be developed to report on online protection arrangements such as EMC's own Mozy backup offering.

The acquisition will probably trigger a mini DPM vendor buying spree by HP, IBM and Symantec as they are pushed into uprating their own DPM capabilities in order to compete better with EMC.

Fortunately there is one vendor for each of them as a target buy: Bocada for IBM, Aptare for ....

No cost or completion timetable details have been provided by either EMC or WysDM and their respective web sites say nothing about the acquisition.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}