Veritas to Hire M&A Expert
Veritas Software Corp. (Nasdaq: VRTS - message board) is set to hire someone to focus exclusively on merger and acquisition opportunities for the company, according to a research note from Robert W. Baird & Co. Inc. today. Sources close to Veritas confirmed it hopes to hire someone within the next two months.
During a session with Wall Street analysts this week, the Baird note says, Veritas executives said that private company valuations are becoming more reasonable, while refuting rumors that the company was considering acquiring rival Legato Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: LGTO - message board). Sources close to Veritas confirmed it hopes to hire someone within the next two months.
"They were pretty adamant about only doing acquisitions that make sense," says Dan Renouard, VP of research at Baird [ed. note: as opposed to the more common nonsensical acquisitions], "with all indications pointing to deals similar to The Kernel Group deal in late December." (See Veritas Buys Kernel’s Original Recipe.)
Although Veritas was "understandably vague about specifics" on which kinds of companies it may be interested in acquiring, Renouard says, "the general thought was adjacent product areas with caching and networking intelligence are two potentially interesting areas."
He adds, "They decided to put the Legato rumor to rest. It wouldn't make sense even if Legato weren't struggling, because Veritas already has basically everything Legato offers."
Veritas also has plenty of cash available to start buying. During its first quarter, which ended April 16, it reported a cash and short-term investment balance of $1.9 billion (see Veritas Reports Strong Q1).
"Networking intelligence" is a little vague, but given the high level of interest around network-based storage management software and Veritas’s moves into this area already, startups in this space might want to be on alert (see Veritas, Brocade Work on SANs, Veritas Puckers Up for Cisco, and Andiamo: Getting Warmer?).
Notable upstarts touting next-generation storage management software include:
AppIQ Corp.,
CreekPath Systems Inc.,
InterSAN Inc.,
Invio Software Inc., and
TrueSAN Networks Inc.
In the storage resource management space is:
Arkivio Inc.,
Astrum Software Corp.,
Netreon Inc.,
PowerQuest Inc.,
Prisa Networks Inc.,
Storability Inc.,
TeraCloud Corp., and
TrelliSoft Inc.
Companies working on next-generation software for synchronous replication to remote sites for heterogeneous storage configurations include:
Avamar Inc.,
CommVault Systems Inc.,
Kashya Inc.,
LiveVault Corp.,
NSI Software, and
Permabit Inc.
Veritas has also shown a passing interest in the new distributed file systems coming onto the market (see Scale Eight Smells the Software).
It's not the only vendor looking to snap up some of these new software players -- they could be on EMC Corp.'s (NYSE: EMC - message board) list as well (see Who's on EMC's Hot List? and EMC Mulls Software Buys).
— Jo Maitland, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch
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