LGTO on another foray into SANs
biz.yahoo.com
Legato Systems, Inc. Announces Definitive Agreement to Acquire
Intelliguard Software, Inc.
Strengthens Leadership in Storage Area Network Technology and Open Storage Management Standards
PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 28, 1999-- Legato Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq:LGTO - news), a leader in the enterprise storage management software market, today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Intelliguard Software, Inc., a leader in standards-based storage management solutions for Storage Area Networks (SAN). The combination of the two companies will place Legato in a leadership position in the SAN marketplace and open standards
arena.
The transaction is expected to be accounted for under purchase accounting, and is scheduled to close in March 1999. Legato will issue 720,000 shares of stock and the cash equivalent of 180,000 shares of Legato stock at the closing price on the day preceding the completion of the transaction for all of the outstanding stock of Intelliguard Software, Inc. and related companies. The value of the transaction, based on Legato's closing price as of January 27, 1999, is approximately $52 million. Legato expects that the acquisition of Intelliguard will be accretive to its 1999 earnings.
As the amount of computer data continues to dramatically increase, the need to protect and manage it without disruption to business-critical applications is paramount. Through the combined companies' data management and data movement technologies, customers will now be able to protect their corporate data assets with little or no interruption to servers that host mission-critical applications. Customers will now be able to employ SAN technology in their corporate networks with ease
and confidence.
Intelliguard is the developer of the Celestra(TM) architecture, which provides the industry's first true 'server-less' backup for the SAN market. Intelliguard also co-developed the Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP), which is quickly becoming the industry standard for management of Network Attached Storage (NAS). Legato intends to embrace and continue the leadership provided by Intelliguard for the NDMP standard. Vendors that have already endorsed the NDMP
protocol include EMC (NYSE:EMC - news), StorageTek (NYSE:STK - news), Network Appliance (Nasdaq:NTAP - news), and Veritas (Nasdaq:VRTS - news).
According to Legato's president and CEO, Louis C. Cole, ''The integration of Intelliguard's Celestra technology into the Legato product family will enable us to immediately extend our offerings for remote data movement and server-less backup, which will result in increased protection for our customers' corporate data assets. With the addition of this new technology, Legato will offer the key strategic building blocks necessary to protect a corporation's business-critical data, including server-less and LAN-free backup, storage device sharing, data replication services, remote data movement, clustering services, and centralized management software.''
George Wilson, CEO of Intelliguard Software, added, ''We believe our Celestra server-less backup software is the only software of its kind in the market, which gives us a significant technological and competitive advantage in the marketplace. Teaming up with Legato will provide all of our customers with a robust complement of standards-defining storage-management software, all of which will benefit from Legato's extensive worldwide sales and distribution system.''
During the last few months, Legato has made several announcements specifically targeted at the emerging Storage Area Network marketplace. Included in those were the definitive agreements to acquire FullTime Software, San Mateo, California, and Software Moguls, Inc., Eden Prairie, Minnesota. According to Cole, ''We are committed to providing our customers with complete data management solutions that offer data protection in ways that won't interfere with every day business networks. Our plan is to continue to both develop and acquire new technologies that sustain Legato's industry leadership.'' |
