Hoping to strengthen its hand in the market for storage management software, Veritas Software Corp. on Thursday said it has reached agreements to acquire Precise Software Solutions Inc. and Jareva Technologies Inc.
Veritas, in Mountain View, Calif., will buy Precise in a deal valued at US$537 million, Veritas said in a statement. Based in Westwood, Mass., Precise makes application performance management software.
The acquisition will help Veritas to ensure that critical applications from vendors such as SAP AG and Oracle Corp. run faster with its products and have less downtime, according to the statement.
The Precise deal gives Veritas the systems, database, and application management capabilities that will allow the company to provide end-to-end monitoring of a customer’s IT infrastructure, said Ray Paquet, a vice-president at Gartner Inc. working out of Lowell, Mass.
“They’re moving up the stack. They’ve always been a storage management vendor, but they are now a systems and storage management vendor,” he said.
Veritas can now compete against the larger players in enterprise management software, and the deal represents an opportunity for Veritas to take its expertise in storage virtualization technologies and apply that to a new world of application monitoring, said Arun Taneja, senior analyst at the Enterprise Storage Group Inc. in Milford, Mass.
“Veritas has concluded that storage is not an entity that sits in a vacuum. The application is what’s most important, application performance and availability are what people care about,” he said.
The deal puts Veritas into better competitive position against storage management rivals Sun Microsystems Inc. and EMC Corp., Paquet said.
The deal forces competitors to examine their offerings, and decide whether to follow Veritas’ lead, Taneja said. “Companies like EMC (Corp.) that are doing heavy stuff on the storage side are going to need to determine if they are going to move into server provisioning and application management.”
Also, the addition of application monitoring and server provisioning products to Veritas’ lineup will allow the company to sell more of its flagship storage products into enterprises, Taneja said.
In a separate move, Veritas will acquire Jareva, a supplier of server provisioning technology in Sunnyvale, Calif., for an undisclosed amount, Veritas said. Jareva’s technology is intended to allow companies to automatically deploy additional servers, without manual intervention.
