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Acquisition-happy Avocent on April 27 announced its latest planned catch: longtime desktop administration tools provider LANDesk Group, to the tune of about $416 million.
The Huntsville, Ala.,-based KVM switching provider, which has bought some eight companies in the last three years, plans to boost its ability to offer a more complete line of systems and infrastructure management offerings.
“Were filling out the building blocks necessary to provide holistic systems management and infrastructure management solutions,” said Everett Brooks, vice president of market development at Avocent.
In addition to its market-leading KVM switches used in major data centers, the $370 million Avocent also offers products that extend the desktop for unique applications for small and midsize businesses, infrastructure management products for remote access and control for IT administrators managing far-flung servers, routers or desktops.
More recently, it completed its acquisition of out-of-band infrastructure provider Cyclades.
The $90 million Cyclades acquisition, which closed March 30, brought to Avocent the ability to remotely access Linux and telecommunications infrastructure out of band to repair catastrophic failures.
LANDesk brings to the table an industry leading desktop administration management suite, the LANDesk Management Suite, along with a whole series of add-ons for the integrated suite that bring in optional server, patch and process management.
South Jordan, Utah-based LANDesk also adds an integrated security configuration suite, dubbed LANDesk Security Suite.
Next Page: More than just access.
More than Just Access
Avocent intends to exploit the real estate its KVM switches have in data centers to offer existing customers more than just access to servers in a rack.
“We are at the top of [server] racks in a lot of data centers. We believe there are great opportunities to expand outward from whats traditionally been just an access solution. Today the IT administrator uses our product to access the infrastructure, and they use LANDesk to control that infrastructure once theyve got access,” said Brooks.
Avocent also hopes to be one of the surviving tools providers in the musical chairs consolidation game many enterprises are playing now.
Customers “need to consolidate the tools they use. Our product for access [with] the different capabilities and layers to their core solution we believe would be great for our customer base,” said Brooks.
Once the acquisition closes in about 75 days, LANDesk will be an independent division that will continue to market its products as is. LANDesk CEO Joe Wang will continue to lead the organization.
“At some point at a very high level well quickly rationalize what elements of the three companies can be combined to offer the next level of solution for our customer base,” said Brooks.
Although LANDesk only earned $7 million on $83.7 million in revenue in 2005, Avocent said it believes the acquisition price, which in part is subject to achieving agreed-upon targets, is fair.
Avocent did its own internal analysis of the acquisition, which agreed with a third-party assessment. “Ultimately its a very strategic acquisition for us. We dont believe there is anybody whos looking at it from the lens were looking at now and well be able to combine the two solutions in a very different way,” said Brooks.
Avocent and LANDesk also have very little customer and reseller overlap and the two companies cultures complement each other, Brooks said.