Veritas Acquires Seagate Software Network and Storage Management Group
Veritas Software Corp. (Mountain View, Calif., <A HREF="http://www.veritas.com/">www.veritas.com</A>) announced that it will acquire the Network and Storage Management Group (NSMG) of Seagate Software, a majority-owned subsidiary of Seagate Technology Inc. (Scotts Valley, Calif., <A HREF="http://www.seagatesoftware.com/">www.seagatesoftware.com</A>). Veritas claims this will make the resulting organization one of the largest vendors in the storage arena of both the Windows NT and Unix markets.
Veritas Software Corp. (Mountain View, Calif.,
www.veritas.com) announced that it will acquire the Network and Storage Management Group (NSMG) of Seagate Software, a majority-owned subsidiary of Seagate Technology Inc. (Scotts Valley, Calif.,
www.seagatesoftware.com). Veritas claims this will make the resulting organization one of the largest vendors in the storage arena of both the Windows NT and Unix markets.
"Seagate has been struggling for years to tie its higher-end products into the Unix market. By teaming with Veritas, Seagate can now do that," says Michael Peterson, president, Strategic Research Corp. (Santa Barbara, Calif., www.sresearch.com), a market analysis firm.
The combined companies will offer a desktop-to-data center portfolio of storage software products. Seagate Software NSMG already has a solid position in the Windows NT backup, recovery and hierarchical storage management (HSM) space. Veritas provides solutions primarily geared for Unix in the three main storage submarkets: core storage with proven file system, volume management and clustering products; storage resource management with products that provide centralized control of distributed storage resources; and backup and recovery with backup and HSM solutions.
"Seagate is a leader in the NT market, but it lacks the capabilities needed for heterogeneous environments," says Mark Leslie, president and CEO, Veritas. "The new Veritas will integrate the two backup technologies."
The aim of such integration is to enable products from both companies to work in multiplatform environments. "In a year, when the merger starts to actually bear fruit, we’ll see a fully-scalable enterprise-class bridge between the two companies’ products that enables them to work in heterogeneous environments," says Strategic Research’s Peterson.
The acquisition of Seagate NSMG is a step forward in Veritas’ multi-year development program to move all its technologies into the Windows NT space. "We’ve only begun to build the channel required to serve this market," says Leslie. "This merger will save us 3 or more years of investment, remove certain execution risks, and enjoy advancement immediately for [Backup Exec] and our Foundation products."
The acquisition jump-starts Veritas’ ability to deliver Windows NT 5.0 storage management technologies including Windows NT backup, remote storage server HSM technology, automated system recovery and logical disk management.
Seagate Technology is essentially letting go of the NSMG, but will continue to work with Veritas. "Seagate Technology has entered into an OEM and joint development agreement with the new merged company in order to license technology that can be utilized with our storage devices, and delivered to our existing OEM, VAR and systems integrator customer base," says Steve Luczo, Seagate Technology’s president and CEO. "This merger represents an acceleration of our strategy to participate in the market for scalable storage management software solutions."