History 2004: EMC Fills Dantz Card

The ogre is still on the rampage, with its 15th software acquisition since 2000.

With the purchase of the privately-held company Dantz Development for less than $50 million (only!) in cash, EMC proves once and for all it wants to be the number one player in storage software, from the high-end to the very lowend, and even at the level of individual PCs.

Dantz, founded in 1984, is in fact, a significant player in backup for PC in small and mid-sized companies, but also for Macintosh, where its market position is especially strong, thanks to a solid distribution network and a bunch of OEMs (Certance, Exabyte, HP, LaCie, Maxtor, Western Digital).

Millions of computers are currently protected by its successful Retrospect software, which boasts a half-million registered users and will now round out the lower end of Legato’s offer, in order to compete more effectively vs. Computer Associates, NovaStor, Symantec, Veritas and Yosemite.

EMC will now be able to rely on this enormous installed base to place its recent line of low-end storage products.

Incidentally, this is the first time that EMC will have a storage offering for the Apple environment.

Dantz and its 80 employees will continue to operate in Walnut Creek, CA, while president and CEO Larry Zulch will now report to Dave DeWalt and Mark Lewis, who head the EMC software group.

It would be interesting to see if Dell, EMC’s reseller, will switch from CommVault Systems to Dantz for the backup software offered with Clariion SANs.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 201 on October 2004 from the former paper version of Computer Data  Storage Newsletter.