Merger a Boon for Both StorageTek, Storability

StorageTek can further develop its ILM portfolio; Storability gets instant credibility.

Storage Technology Corp. and Storability Software Inc. will both emerge as winners from their merger announced last week, according industry analysts.

Analysts largely agree that Storabilitys offerings dovetail well with StorageTeks current products and future strategy, claiming the products StorageTek acquired when it purchased Storability will give the company a platform from which to build even more functionality.

The most notable product StorageTek, of Louisville, Colo., gained in the acquisition was Storabilitys flagship Global Storage Manager SRM (storage resource management) software, which helps users manage components within multivendor, multisite storage environments.

StorageTek, according to Nancy Hurley, a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group of Milford, Mass., will be able to leverage the strong assessment and reporting capabilities of GSM to fulfill the first phase of an ILM (information lifecycle management) process. The first phase of an ILM process generally includes assessment, classification, implementation policies and automation.

StorageTek likely will use GSM as a platform for further development in an effort to present a full ILM portfolio, but how the combined technologies will function together or how far they will go toward reaching the goal of developing a full ILM still remains to be seen, Hurley said.

"StorageTek still needs a good deal of software to implement the rest of the ILM process," she noted.

The largely amicable acquisition couldnt have come at a better time for Storability, of Southboro, Mass., which has had trouble signing up large OEMs, causing it to lack credibility in the eyes of some end users.

"This class of software is so central to an enterprise that they prefer to buy from a large, stable supplier, and in the hands of StorageTek all of that changes," said Arun Taneja, president of the Taneja Group, a storage consulting firm based in Hopkinton, Mass. "So StorageTek gets a solid product, and Storability gets a path to the market. Its a good deal."

Taneja expects GSMs trajectory now to increase significantly, much like the enterprise storage management software from Burlington, Mass.-based AppIQ Inc., which gained little traction until signing Hitachi Data Systems and Sun Microsystems Inc. as resellers.

As for Storabilitys customers, Taneja believes this acquisition will ensure that they will continue to receive long-term support while seeing enhancements to the product over time.

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