History 2003: EMC Lucky 13th Acquitition

EMC continues to prove the hungriest of storage companies in terms of acquisitions, and its record won’t be beaten anytime soon, given that it has just marked its 13th acquisition since 1998.

The firm has just got a hold of Astrum Software, for an undisclosed price that was probably fairly low.

This little 30-employee start-up, founded in January 1997 by Robert Infantino in Boston, MA, raised $5.3 million in a first financial round in 2001.

Its flagship product is an SRM software OEMed since last year by Overland Storage. Other known partners include Daymark, Innovative Information Solutions, NetApp, Novell, Oracle, Sybase and Unicom.

It seems an odd coincidence that since it embarked in storage software reselling in 2002, Overland chose 2 products, from 2 companies, Prisa Networks and Astrum, both of which have since been acquired by EMC.

It would appear, at least, that the storage giant and the library maker have similar notions about the type of software that interests them.

Overland currently continues to resell the software products of Astrum Software.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 184 on May 2003 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.

Note: EMC acquired a record of 85 companies from 1983 to 2015 before its acquisition by Dell in 2015.