Legato's $US1.3 billion takeover by EMC will increase the number of staff in its local office and position Australia as the company's Asia-Pacific region hub.
David Wright, Legato's chairman and CEO said in Sydney yesterday that the company will continue to operate as an independent entity, retaining its own brand and marketing functions. The injection of funds would boost the company's investment in R&D projects, Wright said.
He said job function duplication in the US would mean about 50 of Legato's back-office staff would be retrenched, and about 130 people from EMC will transfer to Legato.
The deal, still subject to shareholder approval, surfaced in July when EMC announced plans to purchase the storage software vendor in an all-stock deal intended to plug a gap in EMC’s storage backup software offering and eventually help it offer an integrated storage product that manages the entire life cycle of data, from creation to archive.
EMC currently holds only 2 per cent of the backup and recovery software market, and Legato has 8.1 per cent, according to Gartner.
At the same time, Legato announced broad support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2003.
In a three-year buying spree EMC has acquired nine storage software companies in an attempt to reposition itself from a hardware-only company to a storage “solutions” vendor offering customers a complete storage architecture, from arrays to hierarchal storage management software.
Also yesterday, Legato announced support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2003. Chris Baker, group product manager for Exchange at Microsoft, said Legato's information management solutions offer backup and recovery, high availability, archiving, records management and compliance functionality.
A Legato spokesman said it will implement a global go-to-market program with key systems integrators from October 22. Solutions supporting Exchange 2003 include NetWorker Module version 4.0 and in Q4 support will be added to StandbyServer AAdvanced and AAM.