"EMC will continue delivering the same value to our customers with the EMC branded product set as we did before this announcement," he said.

Duplessie said database archiving is the fastest growing segment of the market, outpacing similar products used to archive both e-mail and documents.

In a survey completed last week by Enterprise Strategy Group, 48 percent of respondents said they plan to purchase and implement database archiving technology within the next two years. Another 35 percent expect to deploy it sometime after two years, Duplessie said. "All of a sudden, HP looks like geniuses," he said.

Mike Feinberg, chief technology officer for HP's StorageWorks division, said that OuterBay's archiving software will be an integral part HP's information life-cycle management strategy and that the LiveArchive software is already integrated with HP's StorageWorks Management software.

Feinberg said that HP is in the process of integrating OuterBay's technology with HP's StorageWorks Reference Information Storage System -- an application that performs indexing of structured and unstructured data and then performs searches on that data. "Sixty percent of servers sold by HP are running Oracle today," Feinberg said. "We're talking about the management of structured and unstructured data now."