IBM buys Diligent Technologies company

By: Sara Smith
Staff Writer
Published: Jul 21, 2008

Diligent Technologies is IBM's third acquisition in Israel which offers data de-duplication solutions for e-mail and databases.

Diligent Technologies is IBM's third acquisition in Israel to date this year. In January, it bought storage technology company XIV for nearly $350 million, and last week it bought data recovery company FilesX Ltd. for a approximately $80 million.

Diligent Technologies is closely linked with XIV executive chairman Moshe Yanai, who is now responsible for storage development at IBM.

Yanai and Diligent chairman and CEO Doron Kempel co-founded the company as a spin-off of EMC Israel in 2002. EMC Corp. still owns 20% of Diligent, which develops solutions for one of the hottest fields in data storage.

The company's solutions enables data storage facilities to back up only changes made in files, rather than duplicate the entire file system, thereby eliminating redundancies to save space.

Diligent Technologies has raised $50 million. Its shareholders, in addition to EMC, include Accel Partners, Gemini Israel Funds, Eastward Capital Partners, and Matrix Partners.