Under the terms of this acquisition, OTG has acquired privately held UniTree for approximately $20 million, through a combination of $6 million in cash, common stock and promissory notes. This acquisition is expected to be neutral to combined financial statements in 2001, and nominally accretive to the combined financial statements by the end of 2002.

With this acquisition, OTG believes it has effectively doubled its addressable market by penetrating the UNIX and Linux storage markets. According to Gartner/Dataquest, the market for UNIX-based storage software is expected to grow at a 32% CAGR to $8B in 2005 and IDC estimates the growth rate of the Linux storage management software market at a 60% CAGR.

With the UniTree database technology, OTG believes it will be first to market with its transparent database storage management solution for Oracle and IBM DB2 databases. This new solution intelligently segments and migrates data to less expensive storage media while uniquely providing seamless access. With the tremendous growth in data warehousing, CRM, ERP and other database-centric applications, OTG will now have new opportunities to target enterprise customers and significant alliances.

OTG believes that UniTree’s product set also encompasses the broadest reach among any similar technologies today, addressing 70% of the UNIX market with support for Sun Solaris, HP-UX, Compaq TRU64, SGI IRIX and Red Hat Linux.

UniTree has seven years of technology development in its UNIX-based storage software, which complements OTG’s nine years of product and channel success in the Windows environment, said Richard Kay, president and CEO of OTG Software. With our recent acquisition of Smart Storage, we added UNIX storage technology primarily for the departmentally focused CD/DVD market. With UniTree, we have significantly expanded our UNIX/Linux market opportunities by adding high-end optical and tape storage solutions that scale to petabytes of data.

OTG has already integrated portions of UniTree’s technology into its current DiskXtender UNIX Edition and Linux Edition products. By acquiring this technology and bringing aboard UniTree’s talented staff of approximately twenty people, OTG will utilize the same successful integration approach that it has employed in its prior acquisitions of xVault and Smart Storage.

Since 2000, we have been part of a successful relationship with OTG focused on their DiskXtender solutions for UNIX and Linux, said Mark Saake, CEO of UniTree. Now, by becoming part of OTG, we can more effectively bring our proven database and file system products to the market, while concentrating on developing next-generation solutions for UNIX and Linux data management.

SOURCE: COMPANY PRESS RELEASE