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Technology Stocks : Veritas (VRTS) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mark K. who wrote (240)	10/20/1998 2:50:00 PM
From: Beltropolis Boy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 742

Veritas now has a tough management issue: channel conflict between its direct sales force and its new two-tiered distribution channel. This can be handled, but it will take a good deal of effort. Integration of the Seagate NT product into the enterprise product Veritas sells will also be a challenge. The purchase adds a new market for Veritas, but not a market Legato competes for. mark. appreciate you shedding light on this for me. seems the street, as usual, had its myopic mr. magoo view; the techies sure seem to like it. peeking over again from the LGTO board, -chris. ----- InternetWeek October 12, 1998, Issue: 736 Section: News & Analysis Veritas: Multiplatform Power Chuck Moozakis Veritas Software Inc.'s $1.6 billion acquisition of Seagate Software Inc.'s Network and Storage Management Group should enable the company to carve a commanding lead in multiplatform backup and restore products. The resulting company will blend the strengths of Veritas, which has zeroed in on high-end Unix workstations, with Seagate's NSMG, which has cultivated a close relationship with Microsoft as it targets Windows NT backup environments. The stock-swap transaction comes as IT managers lay the groundwork for complex storage area networks (SANs) engineered to handle the ballooning amount of data being pumped through enterprise networks. SANs require sophisticated storage and backup management apps capable of overseeing information from multiple platforms across the network. It's A Keeper Analysts and Seagate users gave a strong thumb's up to the acquisition. "I'm very high on this," said John McIntosh, an analyst at Storage Systems Marketing. "Veritas has put together a package of software that will be very difficult for other vendors to compete with." Doug Koenig, a systems analyst at Ford Motor Co., was equally optimistic. "I like the idea of a single enterprisewide product that has multiplatform capabilities. I see them as providing a very scalable solution." Providing these tools will be among the foremost goals of the combined company, said Mike Colemere, Seagate Software's vice president of product management. "Through combining Veritas and Seagate, we believe we can condense what ordinarily would have taken up to three years of development [to create SAN-specific management tools] to less than half that," he said. The ultimate goal, Colemere said, is to create a SAN management architecture in which the intelligence to operate the network is taken out of the server and placed in the hubs and switches through which stored data flows. Colemere said the first step will be the development of a single management console through which administrators can oversee both Veritas' flagship NetBackup and Seagate's Backup Exec NT. Further integration between the two apps will follow. None of Veritas' or Seagate's existing apps will be shelved when the two companies combine forces, Colemere said, although Seagate's Client Exec remote backup package will most likely be merged with the TSInfoPRO remote backup application Veritas is acquiring through its recently announced purchase of TeleBackup Systems Inc. "At this point we have no plans to kill any product," said Peter Levine, Veritas' senior vice president of OEM sales, mergers and acquisitions. "One of the big issues we will face is how quickly we can ramp up; for us to stop anything or to let anybody go would be contradictory." Veritas will continue dovetailing all of the applications within Seagate's Enterprise Information Management framework. EIM, introduced in April, is designed to provide better information availability, delivery and analysis across the enterprise by cobbling together storage management apps with policy- and event-based network management suites, such as Seagate's NerveCenter and Crystal Reports. The merger, which is subject to stockholder approval and clearance by the Securities and Exchange Commission, is expected to close in January. Copyright ® 1998 CMP Media Inc. techweb.com