EMC to acquire Captiva for US$275m

Stan Beer
Monday, 24 October 2005 11:00

IT Industry - Strategy

Storage vendor, EMC Corporation, is to buy document capture software vendor Captiva Software Corporation for about US$275 million by early 2006.

Captiva's input management software – which provides for the conversion of paper-based information to digital formats – has become increasingly strategic as companies electronically capture, digitise and categorise more of their information.

According to EMC, The Captiva acquisition represents a natural extension to the EMC Documentum enterprise content management platform and adds existing integrated technology to the EMC software portfolio. Captiva focuses on the early stages of information lifecycle management – information capture, digitisation and categorisation. EMC's aim is to have a solution to enable customers to either eliminate paper or automate its digital capture and integrate the information with electronic business processing for competitive advantage. 

Dave DeWalt, president, EMC Software, said, “Moving forward, this acquisition will enable EMC to deliver further integrated solutions for input management and image processing applications, and will also serve as an increasingly important element of EMC’s enterprise archiving strategy. EMC’s enterprise archiving framework will enable customers to benefit from holistic policies for classification, retention, retrieval, search and access across all information types – structured, unstructured and semi-structured. As a result, customers will realise significant cost savings through unified archiving support for production applications, be better prepared to respond rapidly to legal inquiries, and benefit from a consistent and integrated archiving and retrieval approach for all information.

“EMC and Captiva have shared a strong and fruitful partnership for close to a decade,” added DeWalt. “Through that relationship, we’ve come to truly appreciate the power of our integrated and innovative technologies. Our combined ability to streamline processes and reduce operating expenses is having remarkable impact for customers across the world.”