Computer Associates International Inc. Monday announced plans to buy iLumin Software Services Inc., a move designed to give CA a stake in the fast-growing market for software that manages and archives e-mails and instant messages.

The market, which includes large vendors such as EMC Corp., IBM and Symantec Corp. and smaller firms such as Zantaz Inc. and iLumin, is being driven by regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act that require companies and health care providers to store financial and other corporate information for longer periods of time -- and quickly provide it for legal cases or when regulators such as the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission come calling.

The software allows businesses to set rules so that heavily-accessed information can be stored on faster media such as hard disks, while less-important data is archived on backup tapes, DVDs or other media.

Gartner Inc. predicts that the worldwide market for e-mail archiving software will grow from US$89 million last year to $883 million in 2009.

Islandia, N.Y.-based CA didn"t disclose the terms of the iLumin deal. Founded in 1996, Reston, Va.-based iLumin offers products that complement CA"s existing BrightStor family of storage management tools.

"By enhancing our BrightStor enterprise portfolio with iLumin"s e-mail management technology, CA can now offer customers an exceptionally complete and streamlined approach to managing and protecting the full spectrum of information assets across the enterprise, " said Chris Broderick, senior vice president and general manager of CA"s BrightStor business unit.

ILumin President and Chief Operating Officer Dave Ellison will join CA as senior vice president for BrightStor.

Once just a manager of employee e-mails and IMs, iLumin earlier this month announced a new module for its flagship Assentor software, adding the ability to manage files across a number of operating systems. Files can be grouped according to type, how often they are used and other policies, then be stored accordingly or archived on different media.