Legato Couples With Big Blue

Legato Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: LGTO) may be on the verge of becoming a unit of EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), but that hasnt stopped the company from signing a massive reseller deal with EMC competitor IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) (see EMC Gobbles Legato and IBM Uses Legato for Email).

The Mountain View, Calif., company said today that IBM will soon start reselling three of its email management and archival products:

• EmailXtender, which is a policy-based system for automatically collecting, organizing, and retrieving email messages and attachments.
• EmailXaminer, which helps companies monitor email content to ensure compliance with government regulations and corporate policies. It also simplifies the storage and retrieval of emails, Legato says.
• DiskXtender 2000, which automatically moves inactive data to cheaper storage, while continuing to allow users to access the data as before.

IBM is expected to start reselling the Legato email software at the end of this year as part of its own enterprise email storage and retrieval initiative. The two companies are demonstrating the joint solution, which works with Lotus Notes/Domino and Microsoft Exchange/ Outlook, at this week’s IBM eServer xSeries technical conference in Orlando, Fla.

Legato won’t reveal how much the deal is worth, but George Symons, the company’s CTO, says it is significant. “We think it has tremendous potential,” he says.

The deal, which has been in the works for the past six months, not only promises to line Legato’s pockets with some extra cash, he says, it also helps validate EMC and Legato’s claims that the software vendor will remain an independent, separate software division once the acquisition is complete. “There’s been some skepticism as to whether we would be able to continue to run as an independent software vendor,” he says. “This is a proof point. This is critical.”