Symantec snaps up IP, assets of continuous data protection vendor Revivio

Symantec last week snapped up faltering continuous data protection vendor Revivio for an estimated $20 million.

The company bought Revivio’s intellectual property and will discontinue sales and development of Revivio’s Continuous Protection System appliance. Symantec does not normally announce the acquisition of intellectual property, a spokeswoman says.

Symantec, which got into the data protection market with its acquisition last year of Veritas, plans to add Revivio’s technology to its NetBackup product and sell a standalone CDP product of its own. It already has near-continuous data protection capability in its Backup Exec products.

CDP technology saves data to disk as changes are made – continuously -- rather than on a scheduled basis. With CDP software, IT administrators can roll back changes to any point-in-time.

Symantec’s acquisition of Revivio’s IP signals further consolidation of the backup, recovery and replication space. Network Appliance acquired Alacritus in 2005 for its CDP, as well as virtual tape library, technologies. EMC bought Kashya earlier this year for CDP and replication; EMC replaced an OEM deal with Mendocino and introduced Kashya technology in its RecoverPoint product. In July, CA purchased XOsoft for its CDP and replication capabilities. Also, Atempo acquired Storactive..

Other big vendors such as IBM and Microsoft also have introduced CDP products. HP rebrands and resells Mendocino’s software.

Symantec has extended job offers to Revivio CTO and founder Michael Rowan and Kevin Rodgers, director of engineering, as well as 11 other engineers.

Revivio started in 2001 and has $55 million in funding from Charles River Ventures, Flagship Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Globespan Captial Partners and the Nomura Group. In 2005, Network World named Revivio to its Start-ups to Watch list.