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IT management software provider CA filled a major gap in its product offerings June 13 by acquiring MDY Group International, a small but leading-edge provider of enterprise records management software and services.
CA and MDY did not disclose terms of the transaction.
MDYs signature product, FileSurf, automates and centrally manages physical and electronic records distributed across the enterprise, regardless of location or origin.
The companys Federated RM product enables organizations to enforce records management policies across disparate repositories through a centralized console and rules engine.
The acquisition will help CA customers fulfill their company-wide compliance, corporate governance, and legal discovery requirements in a big way, a CA spokesperson said.
CA, based in Islandia, N.Y., already has sufficient e-mail management capabilities but lacked software that could span all kinds of documents, including digital data, video, photos, audio and word files–plus physical media, such as paper records, film and audio tape.
Physical media is tracked via barcodes and RFID attachments in the MDY system, said MDY CEO Galina Datskovsky, who co-founded the Fair Lawn, N.J.-based company in 1988.
“This is the next step in our overall strategy [to fill out the companys software offerings],” said Anders Lofgren, CA senior vice president of product management and marketing.
CA started its software upgrade with its acquisition of iLumin, a provider of enterprise message management and archiving software, in October 2005 and followed that with an extension of an OEM agreement with Arkivio to manage and archive file system data.
The MDY deal brings in the records-management capability that was previously lacking in the CA portfolio.
Due to new and tighter federal and state auditing requirements, organizations are charged with retaining and cost-effectively managing the growing volume of information often stored in disparate storage facilities.
MDYs record-management product enables customers to fulfill compliance policies and discovery demands without incurring data migration costs or executing large-scale infrastructure changes, Lofgren said.
Forrester Research projects the records management market to grow at compound annual growth rate of 84 percent to $1.3 billion by 2008.
“This is a good move for CA,” Forrester analyst Barry Murphy told eWEEK. “It has had some gaps in its portfolio. I see this as kind of a back door CA is using to get into the enterprise content management [ECM] space, without having to lay out a big investment for another larger company.
“Well see how it all plays out.”
Brian Babineau of Enterprise Strategy Group in Milford, Mass., told eWEEK via e-mail that “MDY has built a strong business as the regulatory compliance and governance events served as catalyst for IT spending in this area. CA made a smart move to acquire the MDY team and technology and now must integrate it with the iLumin solutions as well as with their OEM partners.”
“Without any integration, MDY is the same company with a bigger balance sheet, and customers can utilize any e-mail or file system archiving software with it,” Babineau said.
Previous CA records management solutions were built from a loose combination of BrightStor software combined with iLumins e-mail management software, said Clive Longbottom of Service Director, business process analysis with Quocirca in Berks, U.K.
“MDY brings a highly integrated, single overall solution that has all the capabilities to tie in not only with CAs other storage solutions but also with third parties, such as Symantec [KVS/Veritas] and EMC/Documentum,” Longbottom told eWEEK via e-mail.
CA will market and support the full suite of MDY products and services, which address every aspect of records management, said Bob Davis, senior vice president and general manager of CAs storage management business unit. CA also plans to integrate MDYs records management technology with CA Message Manager.