The move will help Storactive expand its reach into the data recovery market

Data backup and recovery software provider Atempo has acquired Storactive, a small, privately held company that sells CDP (continuous data protection) software, officials from both companies said.

Atempo, which resold Storactive software to its customers before the acquisition, will continue to sell Storactive’s LiveBackup software for protecting data on PCs as well as its LiveServ disk-to-disk backup software for Exchange Server. In addition, Atempo will integrate its Time Navigator backup and recovery software more deeply with Storactive’s software.

“We are going to integrate the capture of data by LiveServ and LiveBackup, particularly e-mail data, and take all that data captured and automatically bring it into Time Navigator so it can be securely stored for a long time,” Steve Terlizzi, vice president of marketing for Atempo, in Palo Alto, California.

The move will help Storactive, a smaller company with about 60 employees and 120 customers, expand its reach into the data recovery market and into other platforms and applications, officials said.

“The timing for us is great,” said Tony Bautista, former president of Storactive. “As a small company, we were always challenged with ‘who are you and how long will you be around?’ ”

CDP software backs up data whenever a change is made, as opposed to traditional back-up methods that back up data sets from a specific point in time.

“Traditional approaches of scheduling data to be backed up or of capturing data at a given point in time are unacceptable because data is growing so big; you can’t do it by just scheduling time to do it because you don’t have enough time or it’s too disruptive” said Terlizzi. Plus, he added, the need to comply with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act is increasing data-retention pressures on companies.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Atempo will maintain Storactive’s facilities in Marina del Rey, California, and Moscow, Russia.