Veritas Software Monday closed one of its most
significant acquisitions ever Monday, cementing its transformation as a
utility computing provider with its purchase of Precise Software Solutions
.
The Mountain View, Calif. maker of storage software paid approximately $609
million, consisting of about $400 million in cash and 7.4 million shares of
common stock for the vendor of application performance management, a market
segment research firm IDC said could be worth $4.92 billion by 2006. Veritas
first announced the deal last December concurrently with its purchase of
Jareva Technologies for $62 million in cash.
While Veritas has made it a point to create software that paves the way for
heterogeneous software management, its acquisition of Precise products
should help its speed the rate at which data can be accessed. This is a key
ingredient in the company’s utility computing model, where customers will be
able to request computing power as they need it.
Currently IBM , HP
, Computer Associates
, Sun Microsystems
and even Microsoft
are working on
similar agendas for such computing provisions. In this high-stakes push to
help enterprises lower total-cost-of-ownership and raise return in
investment, Veritas already counts Carnival Cruise Lines, Amazon and EDS
among its customers.
“The integrated technologies will allow Veritas to enable utility computing
by increasing the availability and performance of our customers’
applications while lowering the cost of their existing hardware and reducing
the complexity of IT environments,” said Gary Bloom, chairman, president and
CEO of Veritas.
Today’s news means the Precise i3 application performance management suite
officially becomes Veritas i3, which is designed to detect problems with
application performance before the end user notices them, pinpoint the cause
of the problems and correct them. Veritas i3 analyzes the total system
performance, from application to storage, and correlates the results across
all application tiers.
As an indication of the intelligence of the software, Veritas i3 recommends
remedies to correct the problem areas. Veritas plans to integrate Veritas i3
software with its high availability products and server provisioning
technology in the first half of 2004.
Technology outsourcer EDS is already using Veritas i3. Specifically, its EDS
Global Hosting Services utilizes i3 with Veritas’ high availability software
to help provide guaranteed end-user response time to hosted business
applications.
The Precise purchase will also help Veritas to bolster its storage resource
management (SRM) suite because it now has Precise StorageCentral, which is
storage resource management software focused on file and quota management in
Windows environments. Renamed Veritas StorageCentral, the software allows IT
organizations to reclaim disk space and control storage growth and
allocation to reduce storage and administrative costs.
In related news, Veritas announced a strategic channel agreement with CDW to
deliver StorageCentral software to Microsoft Windows customers throughout
the U.S. CDW is acknowledged as the nation’s largest provider of multi-brand
technology products and services.
“Storage resource management will continue to be the fastest growing segment
of the storage software market, with Windows becoming the leading storage
resource management platform,” said Bill North, director of research,
storage software. “By enlisting the support of CDW to deliver Veritas
StorageCentral software, Veritas has accelerated its approach to capturing
the SRM market.”
Veritas Closes Precise Software Purchase
