VERITAS Closes Precise Software Purchase

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VERITAS Software Monday closed one of its most significant acquisitions ever, cementing its transformation as a utility computing provider with the purchase of Precise Software Solutions .

The Mountain View, Calif.-based maker of storage software paid approximately $609 million, which consisted of about $400 million in cash and 7.4 million shares of common stock, for the vendor of application performance management solutions, a market segment that could be worth $4.92 billion by 2006, according to research firm IDC. 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 it speed the rate at which data can be accessed. This is a key ingredient in the company’s utility computing model, in which 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 (TCO) and raise return on investment (ROI), 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,” states Gary Bloom, chairman, president, and CEO of VERITAS.

Today’s news means the Precise i3 application performance management suite officially becomes VERITAS i3. The suite 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 entire system’s performance, from application to storage, and correlates the results across all application tiers.

As an indication of the intelligence of the software, VERITAS i3 even recommends remedies to correct problem areas. VERITAS plans to integrate the 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 bolster its storage resource management (SRM) suite, due largely to Precise StorageCentral, a storage resource management software solution that focuses 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, thereby reducing 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,” says 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.”

This story originally appeared on Internet News.

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Clint Boulton
Clint Boulton
Clint Boulton is an Enterprise Storage Forum contributor and a senior writer for CIO.com covering IT leadership, the CIO role, and digital transformation.

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