CA lights up storage with iLumin capture

This week Computer Associates strengthened its already robust storage management offerings with the acquisition of iLumin, a privately held supplier of enterprise message management and archiving tools. The move will add extra functionality to CA’s existing line of storage management offerings, particularly in the rapidly developing area of ‘information lifecycle management’.

iLumin is a vendor headquartered in Reston, Virginia, that has become one of the fastest growing suppliers of email management, compliance and discovery solutions. Indeed, in the active-archiving sector of the email space iLumin is one of the leading suppliers with new license revenues accounting for almost 20 percent of the market. However, most of this revenue was generated in the United States where the company has eight offices. Outside of North America, prior to the acquisition, iLumin had just a single representative in EMEA – based in London.

The acquisition by CA should make iLumin’s offerings available to a far wider customer base, especially in Europe. This will be of interest to many organizations given that iLumin supplies archiving solutions for email platforms such as Notes, GroupWise and Oracle Collaboration Suite in addition to the more commonly supported Microsoft Exchange. iLumin also provides archiving for a number of instant messaging platforms – an area now under rigorous inspection.

iLumin’s product line-up consists of Assentor Enterprise, Assentor Archive, Assentor Mailbox Manager, Assentor Discovery, Assentor Compliance and the Assentor File System Manager. Assentor Enterprise is an email and file system archiving and records management solution designed for corporate repositories. The software includes archiving, records management, storage management, electronic discovery, plus compliance and supervision capabilities.

In addition to the enterprise suite, each of the individual components can be purchased separately to provide individual functionality such as work process support of litigation search (Assentor Discovery), intelligent content inspection (Assentor Compliance) as well as the core archiving capabilities.

CA hopes to retain all of the staff employed by iLumin as it recognises the value that both the development and sales teams can bring to CA’s operations. Indeed, it is reported that Steve Schneider, Chairman and CEO of iLumin, will transfer into CA to become a Senior Vice President at BrightStor.

This is a shrewd purchase. The iLumin products neatly complement the existing CA portfolio of storage management solutions and add considerable depth to the protection architecture that CA is developing. Altogether, iLumin coupled with the CA storage infrastructure management and security tools will prove attractive to organisations struggling to meet the growing pressures for good governance and compliance.

It will be fascinating to watch how CA develops its comprehensive solution set. The amalgam of CA’s existing core solutions, iLumin and the recently acquired Niku Clarity tools could provide organisations with comprehensive mail, messaging, file, database, and application knowledge and management capabilities. I confidently expect CA to integrate these systems with rapidity.

CA is clearly on the move and is, just as importantly, working hard to bring these solutions to market around the world.