With the completion on Tuesday of its purchase of Precise Software Solutions, Veritas Software will add "a new but complementary sector" to its offerings, according to Craig Stevens, vice president of Asia-Pacific sales.
The $US537 million acquisition, announced in December 2002, gives Veritas an application performance management (APM) family of products and SRM products – Windows-based products for storage resource management. These are ideally suited for distribution channels and the retail market for the NT products – the SRM types of applications, Stevens said.
The APM family manages major production applications – like PeopleSoft, Oracle or any of the main types of applications that drive businesses, Stevens said. "Whenever there is any type of performance issue APM solutions diagnose the root cause of the problem, identify what's causing the issue [to enable it to be fixed] for fast performance of these big-time applications all of which depend on the availability of data to provide information to their users. It's the entree into the high-line application area which now sits on top of other layers within the overall structure [to resolve] issues that can come up from an application performance perspective."
Veritas also announced in December the purchase, for $US62 million, of Jareva Technology, a privately held start-up with 35 employees, which makes server provisioning software that allows IT managers to add servers without manual intervention.
Stevens said the acquisitions furthered Veritas' strategy on utility computing, which highlights the importance of the accessibility and availability of data, and which he likened as essential as electricity's 'flick a switch and it's there' nature.
"We want to apply that same concept of utility to data – where ever you are, no matter what kind of system you're running, no matter what kind of database, no matter what kind of operating system you have, routers, servers, disk array, if you turn on the switch you expect data to be available," Stevens said.
"And the UC message is getting through to customers. It's spot on. It's one thing if you're married to a particular vendor – like all Sun shop – but I've not seen any customers like that. It's not uncommon for an environment to have say, HP, Sun and NT, but if you have solutions, say in Sun and ignore NT, then you can't have true availability of data in all areas, because data might reside in one area but not in another." While many companies compete with Veritas in different sectors of the software market, Stevens claimed the company, as a heterogeneous provider of services across all platforms, all arrays, all databases, operating systems, routers and the like, had no direct competition in the utility computing sector.