Veritas Software
on Thursday moved to acquire Precise Software
Solutions and Jareva
Technologies for $537 million in stock and $62 million in cash,
respectively.
Mountain View, Calif.’s Veritas made the aggressive bids to shore up its
storage and performance management offerings by offering new products that will
provide more value for IT managers looking to cut costs. On another level, the action demonstrates the company’s augmentation from storage management software provider to a maker of storage systems with application performance and availability management products. IDC estimates this market will be worth $11 billion by 2006.
The purchases are part of a continuing trend in the software industry, which has seen large firms looking to fill holes or broaden their portfolios snap up smaller firms with exit strategies.
Of the Precise play, Martin Ward, Director of Product Marketing for Veritas, said his firm purchased a leading creator of application performance management software to help IT managers run important applications from the likes of SAP, Oracle and Microsoft with the best performance possible and minimal failure. Precise monitors all
parts of the application infrastructure, including Web servers, application
servers, databases and storage, to let customers identify and correct
problems before they impinge on applications. Competitors in this space include BMC, Quest Software, Computer Associates and Compuware.
In privately-held Sunnyvale, Calif.’s Jareva, Ward told internetnews.com Veritas has aimed to add server automation software. Jareva’s products allow businesses to lower
their IT costs by making more efficient use of server hardware and reducing
the need for IT staff to perform administrative tasks. Rather than manually
setting up servers for specific operating systems and business applications,
Jareva’s server provisioning technology lets companies automatically deploy
additional servers without human intervention.
Also with Jareva’s server provisioning software, servers can be moved
between applications depending on workload. For example, a server could run
SAP on Windows 2000 one day, and then run Oracle on Linux the next. Sharing
servers allows CIO’s to drive more value out of their hardware investment, Ward said. Competitors in this space include BladeLogic, PlateSpin and