OuterBay Buys BitByBit

Together the two companies pledge to check the unbridled growth of application data.

OuterBay Technologies is looking to extend its application data management software with the acquisition Tuesday of BitByBit International.

The acquisition, the value of which was not announced, will enable OuterBay to extend its suite of software for improving enterprise application performance by managing the growth of stored data.

OuterBays Active Resource Monitor and LiveArchive technologies enable companies to limit the amount of Oracle Corp. and PeopleSoft Inc. applications data they keep. Unmanaged growth of data tables causes performance and stability problems, that ultimately cascade into rising costs for additional hardware, said OuterBay CEO Michael Howard.

"The secret sauce behind [our product is the ability] to identify active and inactive data, relocate inactive data onto less expensive [hardware] and maintain user and application transparency," said Howard, in Campbell, Calif.

BitByBit, of Oxford, England, brings both technology and market presence to OuterBay. Once BitByBits technology is integrated into the OuterBay products, which is expected this quarter, OuterBay offerings will support applications running on DB2, SQL Server, Informix and Sybase databases, in addition to Oracle databases.

OuterBay will internally use BitByBits Development Studio for pruning programs as well as make it available to OuterBay customers. The company also plans to integrate into its own offerings the BitByBit SubSetter, which reorganizes data and reclaims storage space.

"The bottom line technical foundation that BitByBit provides is more generic and applicable to more databases," Howard said. "OuterBay brings unambiguous insight into the application layers."

BitByBit also adds 150 customers to the 25 that OuterBay already has. Plus, the English company has a much bigger customer and distributor base in Europe and Asia than OuterBay.

OuterBay has a direct sales force and 24-by-7 support that BitByBit did not.

Huw Price, the founder of BitByBit, will become vice president of OuterBays European operations.

This story was edited after its original posting to correct the spelling of Huw Prices name.

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