Veritas Completes Precise Acquisition

Veritas Software Corp. on Monday completed its acquisition of Precise Software Solutions, for which it paid $609 million. The acquisition provides Veritas with software for database monitoring, application performance, and storage-resource management.

Veritas is moving quickly to integrate Precise's products with its own product line. The Precise i3 application-performance tool was renamed Veritas i3. It's used to detect application-performance problems, help figure out the root cause of the problems, and provide automated suggestions for fixing them.

The acquisition is an early move in Veritas' plan to grow out of the storage management niche, where it's the market leader, and become a bigger player in overall IT infrastructure management. The Precise acquisition adds application and database monitoring and management capabilities. But it will take time for Veritas to put together a larger portfolio of products so it can offer tools to manage more applications and other software, servers, network devices, and bandwidth. While it wants to compete against the larger management suites offered by Computer Associates, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM's Tivoli Systems, Veritas needs to avoid creating a complicated and hard-to-use overstuffed suite of management products, analysts say.

The storage-resource management product acquired from Precise, for example, will bump heads with two similar products Veritas already offers. "They have a bit of tangled web there," says Ray Paquet at Gartner. But, he says, Veritas is moving in the right direction as it tries to connect storage and databases to an application under one management product.