EMC is nearly always first to market with new technologies, and users could typically expect that when EMC makes an acquisition in a particular area, other acquisitions tend to follow Robinson said.

EMC has had an agreement for some time with Arkivio Inc., which makes its Auto-stor product in this area. Network Appliance Inc. penned an agreement with Kazeon Systems Inc., along with and Hitachi Data Systems Corp., which also has a reseller agreement with Scentric Inc.

Other storage vendors, such as Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc., have not yet announced such agreements with data-classification start-ups such as StoredIQ Corp.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Kazeon produces the Kazeon Information Server, which it first shipped in October 2005. In addition to selling its product directly, Network Appliance licenses it and sells it to customers, said Michael Marchi, vice president of solution marketing. Kazeon focuses on unstructured data and recently announced an alliance with Google Inc. to provide file searching to Google's search appliance, he said.

Austin-based StoredIQ produces the Information Classification and Management 5000 information server, which works with both unstructured data and e-mail.