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Features - Financial Plays Of The Week:

VERITAS COMPLETES ACQUISITION OF PRECISE SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS

VERITAS Software Corporation, a leading storage software provider, announced recently that it has completed the acquisition of Precise Software Solutions, a leader in application performance management. The aggregate value of the merger consideration is approximately $609 million, consisting of approximately $400 million in cash and 7.4 million shares of VERITAS common stock, subject to final tabulation by VERITAS' exchange agent. With 22 consecutive quarters of revenue growth, Precise Software leads the application performance management (APM) market, a high-growth market that industry analysts predict will grow to $4.92 billion by 2006(1).

For years VERITAS has provided heterogeneous software to ensure the availability of data and applications. With the acquisition of Precise Software, VERITAS expands its heterogeneous offering to enable performance optimization of enterprise applications by accelerating the rate at which data can be accessed. A utility computing model requires fast, reliable access to data and applications, and only VERITAS can offer this capability from application to storage. Further details on VERITAS' integrated product roadmap will be rolled out in three months.

"The acquisition of Precise brings VERITAS into an exciting new market while complementing our leading heterogeneous storage software solutions," said Gary Bloom, chairman, president and CEO of VERITAS Software. "The integrated technologies will allow VERITAS to enable utility computing by increasing the availability and performance of our customers' applications while lowering the cost of their existing hardware and reducing the complexity of IT environments."

With the acquisition close, the Precise i3 application performance management solution becomes VERITAS i3, allowing VERITAS to take performance management to the next level. VERITAS i3 technology is designed to proactively detect application performance problems before the end user notices them, to identify the root cause of the problems, and help to correct them. The newly acquired VERITAS i3 technology analyzes the total system performance, from application to storage, and correlates the results across all application tiers, isolating the root cause of performance degradation. Once the root cause is identified, the software recommends solutions so that corrective action can be taken. VERITAS i3 software will be sold directly by VERITAS and through qualifying distributors and reseller partners. VERITAS plans to integrate VERITAS i3 software with its high availability products and server provisioning technology in the first half of 2004.

With the close of the Precise acquisition, VERITAS also expands its storage resource management (SRM) suite. Precise StorageCentral, the leading storage resource management software focused on file and quota management in Windows environments, becomes VERITAS StorageCentral. VERITAS StorageCentral allows IT organizations to reclaim disk space, automatically control storage growth and allocation, ultimately reducing storage and administrative costs. The StorageCentral software gives customers increased control of Windows file and print server environments, controlling storage capacity and improving server availability. VERITAS StorageCentral software will be available through qualifying VERITAS distributors and reseller partners. VERITAS today also announced a strategic channel agreement with CDW to deliver VERITAS StorageCentral software to customers throughout the United States.

Quotes

Amdocs

"Amdocs, the world's leading provider of billing and CRM, is committed to enabling our customers to significantly improve operational efficiencies and lower costs, while reducing time to market of new, innovative services. The VERITAS i3 application performance management (APM) software suite enables our customers to gain a competitive edge in the fast paced telecommunications market by helping to ensure optimal performance of their Amdocs applications. Amdocs also deploys the VERITAS i3 solution within our own IT organization during development, deployment and production. Our relationship with VERITAS contributes not only to our business success, but also to assisting our customers in meeting their business success."

  • Michael Couture, vp Marketing, Amdocs

BEA

"Application performance management continues to be high on our customers' list of requirements. IT organizations today are looking to increase productivity and return on investment associated with application performance and system optimization. We look forward to working with VERITAS in this area and helping our customers achieve their demanding IT initiatives."

  • Scott Edgington, vp and General Manager, Global Software Partners, BEA Systems Inc

Carnival Cruise Lines

"We are pleased to see VERITAS' business growing into overall system performance. The combination of VERITAS and Precise technologies is a great benefit to us because we can go to VERITAS for storage software and performance solutions and forgo the time and costs associated with product integration."

  • Doug Eney, vp systems, Carnival Cruise Lines

CDW

"With VERITAS StorageCentral, CDW customers will be able to use quota management and policy-based management tools to automate and improve storage utilization. This powerful storage resource management (SRM) software will be instrumental in helping our customers reduce their total cost of managing storage. It's clear that VERITAS' acquisition of Precise Software demonstrates a continued commitment to the Windows market and a strategic move into the SRM market."

  • James Lillis, vp of Corporate Sales, CDW Computer Centers Inc

EDS

"Precise i3 is already a global standard within EDS Hosting and enables EDS to guarantee response time and provide increased application speed for our clients' business-critical applications, thereby enhancing service excellence and solidifying our industry-leading 100 percent service level agreement. VERITAS Cluster Server and VERITAS Foundation Suite are also global standards within EDS Hosting and provide our clients with leading high availability and instant recovery capabilities of business critical applications. VERITAS' acquisition of Precise Software provides a synergistic environment that now enables us to offer unparalleled application performance and availability."

  • Larry Lozon, vp, EDS Global Hosting

(1) IDC. "Worldwide Performance and Availability Management Software Forecast and Analysis, 2002-2006." Grieser, T. 2002.


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