HP to buy archiving software maker

BANGALORE: HP today signed an agreement to acquire Persist Technologies, Inc., a provider of software designed for long-term storage and access of reference information such as e-mail. The acquisition is expected to improve HP's ability to deliver complete information lifecycle management (ILM) solutions. ILM is HP's strategy to manage information from its creation through deletion and according to its changing business relevance over time.

With Persist's archiving software, HP expects to deliver archiving solutions to assist customers in complying with emerging and stringent data retention regulations and extract business value from large amounts of reference information.

"Customers today are looking for ILM solutions that reduce the cost of managing reference information while enabling compliance with data retention regulations," said Bob Schultz, senior vice president and general manager, Network Storage Solutions, HP.

"Persist builds on HP's comprehensive portfolio of ILM solutions and global reach with unique and innovative software, skilled personnel and in-depth experience in the burgeoning ILM market segment," said Paul O'Brien, chief executive officer, Persist. "We are looking forward to becoming part of the HP team and offering our customers a more tightly coupled solution and specialized sales and support."

Persist develops and markets software for active archiving of e-mail, Microsoft Office and other popular data types. When integrated with HP ProLiant servers and ProCurve switches, the Persist software creates an active archive system that can scale to handle growing content storage demands.

With Persist, information and attributes are divided across self-contained modules, called SmartCells. SmartCells incorporate both storage and processing power and can be federated to create redundant, modular, grid-like computing and storage capacity.

The Persist software also includes an index, search and retrieval capabilities that makes it possible to search and retrieve both structured and unstructured content. The search and retrieve capability is independent of the creating application and executed using a search engine-like interface.