EMC Corporation, the world leader in information management and storage, today announced that it has acquired Kashya, a privately held provider of enterprise-class data replication and data protection software. The San Jose, California-based company was acquired in a cash transaction valued at approximately $153 million. The acquisition is not expected to have a material impact on revenue and EPS for 2006. Kashya will be integrated immediately into the EMC Software Group.

Dave DeWalt, President, EMC Software Group, said, “Information protection is a chief concern for customers today. By combining Kashya’s rich portfolio of heterogeneous replication software with our industry leading virtualization and continuous data protection technologies, EMC is enhancing the market’s broadest set of capabilities for virtualizing and safeguarding the world’s information.

“Today’s acquisition expands our market and gives us key technology to extend our share of growing and strategic information infrastructure markets,” DeWalt added. “Beyond the complementary nature of its products and partner ecosystem with that of EMC, Kashya represents immediate technology infusion in the areas of storage virtualization, recovery management and heterogeneous replication while bringing key technologies to EMC for future development. Additionally, Kashya’s Israel-based R&D operation forms the core of the new, innovative EMC Israel Software Development Center, creating new center of excellence for EMC software development.”

Michael Lewin, Kashya CEO and Co-founder, said, “The combination of Kashya and EMC is a natural fit, and will enable us to achieve our ultimate vision and capture our full market potential. Joining EMC, the market leader, gives us the chance to scale out our technology faster and fortifies our leadership position in the emerging field of network-based data replication and data protection.”

Kashya disaster recovery and “snap” replication technology will augment EMC Invista?, EMC’s flagship network-based block storage virtualization solution. Kashya also brings its market-leading continuous data protection (CDP) technology to EMC to be used as the engine in future releases of EMC RecoverPoint? software. Finally, through its current product set, Kashya allows EMC to expand its software portfolio for remote replication across heterogeneous environments.

This broad connection across EMC’s product offerings further enhances EMC’s lead in bringing information lifecycle management (ILM) to life for customers through open software. Customers achieve ILM in large part through software-enabled intelligence. As the world’s seventh largest software provider, EMC accelerates ILM by integrating open software with the storage and application infrastructure and adding intelligence, flexibility and built-in protection to store information intelligently, manage information resources, protect information and share information through collaborative processes.