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Veritas Software Corp.s December 2002 acquisition of Precise Software Solutions Ltd. is now official at $609 million, officials said today.
“The acquisition of Precise will expand our expertise beyond storage management and into the adjacent application performance management space,” Veritas Chairman, CEO and President Gary Bloom said.
Combined with the $62 million acquisition of Jareva Technologies Inc., which relocated to Veritas Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, the products now manage servers as well. “Weve naturally done a tremendous amount of planning work, weve done a lot of work around product planning and directions. Youll start seeing over the next three to six months the efforts of integration,” Bloom said at the formalization announcement.
However, the road map for integrating all three groups products into one portal wont be complete until 2005, officials reiterated today.
For now, the only changes are in branding: Westwood, Mass.-based Precises application performance monitoring suite, Precise i3, is now called Veritas i3, officials said. Similarly, Precises storage resource management software for Windows, StorageCentral, is now called Veritas StorageCentral, they added. Veritas partners CDW Corp. and Dell Computer Corp. will add the former Precise products to their catalogs, while Precise partner Electronic Data Systems Inc. will continue selling i3 as a Veritas partner, officials said.
“Were having discussions with a number of different providers right now about how we would link Precise solutions in different network infrastructures,” Bloom added. EMC Corp. will probably discontinue reselling Precises products, he said. The acquisition of Precise will not affect Veritas relationship with Microsoft Corp., he said.
Besides the numerous product integrations and channel partnerships, Veritas is still working on storage virtualization, for “the management of all storage on a SAN in a logical pool,” Chief Technology Officer Fred van den Bosch said in an interview today. But as with competitor EMCs storage virtualization plans, “youre probably talking about a little further in the future. Later this year and early next year, our SAN Volume Manager technology will come to market. That is the technology that will allow you to manage SAN pools as a single point,” he said.
The technology will ship inside Cisco Systems Inc.s Multilayer DataCenter Switch family later this year, in Brocade Communications Systems Inc.s Fabric Application Platform early next year, and as a client/server application next year, he said. The technology builds on Veritas current SANPoint Control, which automates provisioning, and Volume Manager, which virtualizes drives inside a storage device, van den Bosch said.
“I was hoping theyd give us details on the components and what the expectations are,” said financial analyst Shebly Seyrafi, of A.G. Edwards & Sons Inc., in St. Louis. “My hats off to both [FalconStor Software Inc.] and [DataCore Software Corp.] for executing in a very tough environment,” he said, referring to the independent storage virtualization companies in Melville, N.Y., and Fort Lauderdale, Fla., respectively. But end users, he noted, “want a vendor thats financially stable whos part of a total solution rather than a box.”