CA gets MDY

Computer Associates International, Inc. representatives have announced the company’s acquisition of records management software and services provider MDY Group. Computer Associates promises to make no immediate changes to MDY and will continue to sell and support MDY product.

Terms of the agreement were not disclosed. Industry buzz finds the deal a wise one of the part of Computer Associates, providing the firm with a content management technology crucial to extending its archiving platform. Computer Associates has made a number of deals lately in order to increase its presence in the storage management software market. The acquisition of iLumin about eight months ago was a viewed as a shrewd move by CA.

The iLumin Assentor product line provided Computer Associates with a nice extension to their extant BrightStor solutions, thanks to Assentor’s comprehensive enterprise message management and archiving for email, instant messages, and other unstructured data across platforms including Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Domino and Novell GroupWise.

With Assentor product, BrightStor solutions can include addressing of message management objectives, including records management, discovery, litigation support, compliance, and supervision. Computer Associates partnerships with firms Arkivio and CaminoSoft provided file archiving, and Gartner, Inc. analysts say “CA is starting to bring together the key components to build an integrated content archiving platform.”

Gartner sees the Computer Associates move as confirmation of their own predictions regarding the emergence of a distinct market for integrated content archiving. CA plans to continue marketing and supporting the full MDY FileSurf product and service suite. This acquisition gives CA an important technology element for developing its archiving platform. MDY FileSurf is a strong records management product with strengths in federated records management and integration with existing content management and e-mail archiving systems.

Vendors operating in the content management space will likely respond by continuing to enhance and extend their offerings to become more serious competitors in e-mail archiving. Headquartered in Islandia, N.Y., Computer Associates International Inc. was founded in 1976 and today operates in more than one hundred countries. CA delivers software and services across operations, security, storage, life cycle and service management.

MDY was founded in 1988 by industry “experts” CEO Galina Datskovsky, Ph.D., and President Mark Moerdler, Ph.D. MDY is a firm specializing in records management, assisting in the control of volume and complexity of physical and electronic records through the entire life cycle from creation to disposition. The bulk of MDY’s clientele is in the legal, corporate and government sectors. MDY is a Microsoft gold partner and a Novell silver developer and integrator partner.