19 December 2002 Veritas Software, the US storage management software company, today made a significant strategic move by acquiring companies from the application-management and server-provisioning markets.

Veritas is paying $537 million in cash and stock for Precise Software Solutions, whose technology monitors and analyses web servers, application servers, databases and storage infrastructure.

At the same time, it is paying $62 million in cash for Jareva Technologies, a privately owned, automated-server-provisioning specialist.

But it is the deal to acquire Precise, which has enjoyed 20 consecutive quarters of growth, that has made the most impact on analysts.

The transaction is seen as a clear sign that Veritas plans to expand aggressively beyond the traditional boundaries of storage management into other areas of systems management software – building an empire to rival Computer Associates’ at a time when technology company valuations are depressed.

“Precise Software Solutions is a strategic acquisition for our business,” said Gary Bloom, the chairman, president and CEO of Veritas. “Together we will solve an unequalled range of customer problems, from performance issues to hardware or software failures to site outages. It is an end-to-end solution that only Veritas can provide.”

Veritas says that the application performance and availability market will be worth some $11 billion by 2006.