Veritas To Make Buys To Beef Up Services, Solutions

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company said it expects to pay $537 million, or about $16.50 per diluted share, to acquire Precise Software Solutions, Westwood, Mass., which makes performance management software and is a solution provider on some EMC-based and Oracle-based offerings.

The Precise deal would enable Veritas to offer a better end-to-end solution to help prevent hardware and software system outages, Veritas CEO Gary Bloom said in a statement. The deal also may give Veritas a financial boost, as Precise,which, like Veritas, is a publicly traded company,has reported 20 consecutive quarters of revenue growth, the companies said.

In a separate deal announced at the same time, Veritas said it plans to buy Jareva Technologies, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based independent software vendor and maker of automated server provisioning technology. Jareva's technology enables IT managers to move servers from, for example, a Windows 2000-based SAP solution one day to a Linux-based Oracle solution the next without manual intervention.

The Jareva deal was valued at about $62 million in cash, according to Veritas.

In making the acquisitions, particularly of Precise, Veritas put out word that it intends to become more competitive with its rivals, which include BEA Systems, Oracle and Microsoft.

"I think we knew there was something coming down the pike with regard to their [high-availability offering, but we didn't know what it was," said Gerry Fostaty, marketing manager for Open Storage Solutions, an Ontario-based Veritas premier reseller that also does business in the United States. "It would certainly round out the product line and position them against the bigger players."

Kris Hagerman, senior vice president of strategic operations at Veritas, said the Precise acquisition would not close for between 90 and 120 days, while the Jareva deal would close in about 30 days. Neither deal will create channel conflict, Hagerman said.