SourceLabs, led by former BEA executives, remains an independent company, EMC states.

"I can confirm that EMC has acquired some of the assets of SourceLabs and has hired a number of the company's employees," EMC spokesman Lesley Ogrodnick said in an e-mail Monday. "SourceLabs' acquired assets will operate within EMC's Cloud Infrastructure Business."

( on the hottest tech M&A deals of 2008.)

EMC's cloud storage strategy includes two distinct offerings, one for the consumer and small business market and another for large companies that need infrastructure for building and delivering Internet-based applications on a massive scale. (Compare )  

The second of these two cloud offerings is the focus of the SourceLabs acquisition, according to Ogrodnick. That would be Atmos, a software platform designed to manage petabytes of information across tens or hundreds of geographic locations. Atmos software, unveiled in November, can either be purchased by itself and run on x86 servers virtualized with VMware's hypervisor, or purchased in a bundle with EMC's "Hulk" hardware offering, which combines x86 servers with high-capacity, low-cost SATA drives.