And these are all companies that can potentially add value immediately because they have good installed bases, smart employees and good technology as well as market drivers behind them.

An aide to Elliot Spitzer (New York's attorney general) told me that for law enforcement, having access to e-mail is like eavesdropping. They've never had that before.

They've bought into a technology that has yet to explode.

They are unique in their approach.

People are just starting to get their toes wet in this technology. They haven't deployed it full-fledged across the entire application infrastructure.

They all have applicability to larger organizations like CA, and they can fill big product portfolio gaps [for vendors that] want to play in the data protection and information management markets.

I think customers are a bit confused over the difference between a lot of snapshots and continuous data protection.

We've seen a ton of archiving companies developing data-protection technologies during the last six months, ... We've seen a lot of search engine companies looking at ways to access this information too.

We've got 80 percent of them saying don't know much about it, but 50 percent of those saying if Microsoft had disk-based backup product, they would use it. You can see the depth of branding and marketing muscle Microsoft can drag along with their product.