Well, this is interesting: VERITAS buys KVS for $225 million in cash. Considering VERITAS’ failure to turn their own archiving product for Windows into a real competitor for KVS, this is an interesting move.
Ultimately, I think it’s a good one, provided that VERITAS is able to effectively leverage the addition of KVS’ staff and products. One of the problems I found when I was there was that their sales force is incentivized to sell UNIX products, and so that’s what they do. Perhaps the addition of these new products will change the mix enough to help get the direct and channel sales forces on track. Since I still own some VRTS stock, that’d be good news.
Paul's Down-Home Page 
Too late Veritas realises it should have bid on Cryoserver or almost any other vendor but KVS!
I think Cryoserver and KVS are totally different products. KVS deals with Exchange/Outlook problems quite effectively, while Cryoserver is a standalone audit system that keeps a copy of everything. There’s actually a good case for buying both products. One for compliance, one to manage Exchange.
I don’t think Cryoserver’s just ahead in compliance, its speed against KVS or anything else I’ve seen so far is stunning. Sub-second search times on million+ archives is Cryoserver ‘s best point, but they don’t even mention that on their website from what I could see (www.cryoserver.com). But there’s bound to be a catch?
Lots of spin here from start-ups hoping that they will be bought by a major player for a fraction of what Veritas payed for KVS.
The reality is that Enteprise Vault is the the market leader here by a mile, the customers says so who consistently select it for archiving projects over others, and the only leader in the Gartner MQ 2 year runnig and has the customers and revenues to back that up.
PS Cryoservr wasnt event aknowledged in the Gartner report!
I think you’re missing the point (and have the most appalling spelling!). Products such as Cryoserver are DIFFERENT to a classic email archiving product such as KVS.
KVS is way, way ahead of products such as Cryoserver (who I presume haven’t paid for a ‘magic quadrant’ Gartner rating but are rated leaders by Radicati, Bloor, Forrester et al), but KVS is not a compliance product and shouldn’t be seen or marketed as such.
….and Sun made Cryoserver their only European email compliance partner recently, after scalability testing to 1,500,000 users (try that with any of the database-dependent, windows-based products such as KVS, Zantaz, Legato). See:
http://uk.sun.com/sunnews/press/2005/2005-03-22.html
Those other products are fine for archiving sub-100k-user systems for short retention periods, but soon run out of puff once they’re asked to store and rapidly find emails from trillions of records stored for decades.
Actually none of these products are much good. KVS is combersome and breaks the Microsoft security model for Exchange. Cryoserver lacks features and only introduces an additional level of complexity that would be most felt during upgrades and migrations. Personally I would recomend AfterMail as this comes from a EDMS and complains background, does not require anything to be installed on Exchange, and comes as a complete solution. It also costs a lot more and is much easier to manage and use. check out http://www.aftermail.com.
It’s notable that we never ever see any genuine customer reviews of AfterMail, probably because compared to KVS they have a miniscule number of customers, and only a few outside New Zealand. All we get are these ‘comments’ sprinkled around web sites knocking well-established products that are market leaders in their fields. Call me a cynic, but perhaps all these comments originate from New Zealand IP’s?!
Aftermail is too late into the market, sells a ‘me too’ SQL-based product (the wrong approach these days!) and doesn’t have people on the ground in the markets and territories it needs to be. One or two employees in UK and USA does NOT a company make! Go and raise some serious cash, develop a serious product, and then come back and tell us how rubbish KVS is!
To correct a couple of errors (BTW I’m a Cryoserver customer – 800 users) they’re in the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant report for financial software, and it’s more feature-rich than all these other products put together. I know, I researched them all for six months before jumping. A presentation at IBM convinced me to trust the company, and then we started the lengthy haggling process.
Like many other so-called compliance products out there, we didn’t even consider Aftermail because their method of securing and (not) encrypting fell way short of what we believe a proper ‘compliance’ product must deliver. The only other product we looked seriously at was Legato (finally lost by being Windows based).
Mind you, if Cryoserver let me down over the next year or so I’ll be straight back here to complain!