Precise Software Acquires W. Quinn

Precise Software Solutions of Westwood, Mass., has acquired W. Quinn Associates Inc., a storage resource and performance management solutions firm in Reston, Va.

The acquisition price is $35 million, including $20 million in cash with the balance paid in Precise shares. The price could rise is W. Quinn meets certain revenue and operating income targets.

Precise makes monitoring technology for application hosting operations.
W. Quinn’s products are used by more than 3,500 companies in 50 countries. The company recently signed a strategic OEM relationship with Microsoft, which has licensed W. Quinn’s technology and embedded it in Microsoft’s Server Appliance Kit. The kit is the foundation software for server appliances sold by Microsoft OEM partners such as Dell, Hewlett Packard, Compaq, IBM and NEC.

Microsoft has standardized its storage resource and performance management on W. Quinn’s flagship product, StorageCentral SRM, for use throughout Microsoft’s corporate data centers worldwide.

Carolyn DiCenzo, chief analyst for Gartner Dataquest’s Storage Management Software Research Group, said, “The acquisition brings together two leading technology players who now have the opportunity to leverage each others’ skills to supply the market with stronger performance tools to better address the storage part of the performance equation. Moreover, W. Quinn’s strong foothold in the NT market and OEM relationship with Microsoft should be very beneficial to Precise as it continues to expand its solutions into this market.”

“Our joint vision is to provide customers with software solutions that significantly improve the performance of the application, in real time, by enabling users to detect and correct the sources of performance degradation across the entire IT infrastructure,” said Shimon Alon, CEO of Precise Software Solutions.

Precise has more than doubled its customer base from 600 to 1,400 in the last year. Together, the combined company will serve more than 80 percent of the Fortune 100.