Veritas Goes On Holiday Buying Spree

Veritas Software Corp. could've waited until Dec. 24 and really crashed some office parties. But the storage software vendor rang in the holidays early Thursday with two acquisitions--Precise Software Solutions and Jareva Technologies. The Precise deal will make shareholders happy since they got "a multiple of five in an awful environment," an analyst says, and some venture capitalists achieved their goals with the deal.

Customers should be the biggest winners, once the holidays are over. Veritas already has a suite of products for backup and recovery, data-volume management, file systems, clustering, and storage networking. Jareva will fit with Veritas' SAN Point Control management product over time, as it lets customers adjust infrastructure resources for performance benefits in order to meet service-level agreements.

While Jareva cost Veritas around $62 million, the Precise deal is valued at around $537 million. Precise has some storage-resource management software from its own acquisition of W Quinn months ago. But Veritas went after Precise for its database-monitoring and tuning capabilities. That should be a whole new area for Veritas.

One industry analyst thinks it could take 12 to 18 months for Veritas to integrate Jareva technology with SAN Point Control, but the Precise capabilities could be on the market soon after the New Year. "Precise has the right product at the right time," Gartner's Ray Paquet says. "Veritas needs to become more apps-based and active on the server."