Legato continues on acquisition spree

PALO ALTO - Legato Systems has established a name for itself in the storage management market over the past 10 years with homegrown products, such as those in its NetWorker line. But in an attempt to deliver a much broader set of server- and storage-related products, the company has increasingly been turning to acquisitions.

Most recently, Legato announced plans to snap up Vinca, a company best known for its NetWare server clustering software.

Vinca, which also offers software for NT and OS/2 servers, agreed to be bought for $94 million.

The deal marked Legato's fourth buy in the past 12 months. According to Legato officials, acquisitions are the fastest way for the company to get into increasingly hot markets, such as the data protection and server availability markets.

Earlier this year, Legato gobbled up Fulltime Software, a maker of clustering and data replication software for NT and Unix networks, and Intelliguard Software, which makes serverless backup tools. Last July, Legato acquired Software Moguls, a vendor of backup and restoral software for NT and Unix machines.

With the acquisition of Vinca, Legato gains the well-regarded StandbyServer line of server mirroring products.

Vinca's software mirrors data from a primary server to a backup server, so if the primary server fails, the backup server can take over its duties.

Vinca also sells software that lets two servers back up each other. Another Vinca package, SnapShotServer for NetWare, is an online backup and recovery system.

"This acquisition allows Legato to become a full-service storage management supplier in the mirroring and data availability area," says Dave Hill, an analyst at Aberdeen Group in Boston.

Legato posted revenue of $143 million and earnings of about $28 million in 1998.