News

Veritas gets Precise for $537M

• By Rich Seeley
• December 20, 2002

Veritas Software Corp., Mountain View, Calif., is buying Precise Software Solutions, Westwood, Mass., in a planned stock and cash transaction valued at $537 million.

The acquisition announced Thursday will add Precise application management and monitoring technology to the Veritas hardware and software management product offerings, said Gary Bloom, chairman, president and CEO at Veritas. The two companies' products are complementary and are frequently deployed together by IT departments in Fortune 500 corporations, he said.

Speaking during a conference call Thursday with reporters and analysts, Bloom explained: ''We really do see them [Precise] heavily in the application performance management market, which is directly adjacent to what we do with our high-availability technology. This now introduces for us the whole concept of high performance for applications. If you take availability and put it together with performance, you have a winning combination. And that's what this acquisition is all about.''

Veritas also announced Thursday the separate acquisition of Jareva Technologies, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based start-up providing automated server-provisioning technology. Buying privately held Jareva for $62 million in cash will further broaden Veritas' product offerings, Bloom said.

During the conference call, he offered an example of how the Veritas, Precise and Jareva software might work together.

''Consider a typical company that has deployed a PeopleSoft e-HR application running on a Windows machine against an Oracle database on a Sun Solaris machine,'' Bloom said. ''Precise is used to monitor the PeopleSoft application. Even before the users begin to call the help desk, it detects that the PeopleSoft e-HR application is experiencing a slowdown. Precise determines that the computer running the PeopleSoft application is running out of resources and recommends that a new one be brought on line to take some of the load. Precise notifies Veritas Cluster Server, which in turn calls Jareva to bring a new computer into the cluster and prime it with PeopleSoft e-HR. As the new computer comes online, performance of the application improves. Problem solved. At the same time, Veritas Cluster Server takes over management of the new computer, ready to take action in the event of any failure.''

Bloom said that integration of the Veritas and Precise products will be facilitated by the experience both companies have with corporate IT departments using both companies' products. He said Veritas will offer further details on the integration of Precise as well as Jareva after the deals are finalized, which he estimated will be in the second quarter of 2003.

Shimon Alon, CEO at Precise, who joined Bloom on the conference call, said he plans to stay on after the acquisition is complete. Along with employees in Massachusetts and Virginia, Alon said, Precise will continue its research and development operations based in Israel.

Bloom said the 470 employees at Precise and 35 employees at Jareva will be added to the 5,600 employees of Veritas. He added that his company, which reported revenue of $1.5 billion in 2001, expects the acquisitions to have a 'neutral impact' on Veritas financials.

Related stories:
''Precise buys rights to EMC toolset'' by Michael W. Bucken at http://www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=6192

''Precise pushes correlation solution forward'' by Peter Bochner at http://www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=6828