History 2003: EMC Transfers Some Software Activity

EMC keeps telling anyone who will listen that it wants to increase its presence in storage software.

Notwithstanding, this did not prevent the company recently from selling off a part of this business to a company called Diligent Technologies founded in June 2002.

What they sold was the product known at EMC by the name CopyCross, a tape virtualization software for Symmetrix arrays that EMC will continue to distribute, on a non-exclusive basis.

Diligent acquires nearly all of the 65 software development engineering team EMC maintained in Israel.

The name of Diligent’s chairman and CEO, Daron Kempel, will be familiar to those who follow the storage industry: he left his position as EMC VP and GM of media solutions group to become CEO of storage software start-up SANgate Systems, a job he had to leave precipitously following a non-compete clause lawsuit lost vs. his former employer.

Diligent’s VP operations Paul Morin and VP sales and marketing Mike Parise are also former EMCers.

With the transaction, EMC in exchange for an estimated value of $4.6 million for the facility plus $5 million in cash, retains a 24% minority stake in Diligent, whose HQs, with 20 or so people, is located in Framingham, MA.

The other investor, with $10 million is the Credo Group, the investment firm of Moshe Yanai, the CTO behind the original Symmetrix design, subsequently let go by EMC.

The company is expected to pursue its developments in enterprise D2D backup and restore for different storage environments.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 180 on January 2003 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.