* Symantec acquires Veritas, EMC gets SMARTS
In their first reading book, the children of Star Trek’s capitalist Ferengi race read these immortal lines: “See Brak acquire. Acquire, Brak, acquire.”
Sometimes humans read this book too, and sometimes the lesson takes hold. Either that or the Ferengi are back, invading the storage sector of the Alpha Quadrant and piling acquisition upon acquisition.
Skeptical? Consider the following evidence:
* Exhibit A: Symantec acquires Veritas
Symantec, best known for supplying anti-virus software and other tools for the desktop, suddenly buys Veritas, a major player in storage management, for a whole pile of stock. In doing so, not only has Symantec become the industry’s fourth largest software company, but the acquisition also gives Symantec a huge pipeline into the enterprise.
Now some of you, I am sure, will remember several of my columns during the past two years. You just naturally might have assumed that Veritas, tired of being skewered here for its somewhat cavalier attitude regarding data security, at last “buddied up” with someone with an interest in data security. Certainly a reasonable guess. Surprisingly, this is not the case however (at least I see no check in my mailbox to indicate that this is so).
What happened was that Symantec bought Veritas – and not vice-versa – and the merged company is likely to go forth into the enterprise and provide some serious challenge to the major management players at both the low end (Microsoft) and the high end (BMC, Computer Associates, HP and IBM). Look for Symantec to begin repositioning the company as a provider of management tools for the enterprise (security, storage and we’ll-see-what-comes-next) over the next quarter.
This will prove to be a good merger for both sides.
* Exhibit B: EMC acquires SMARTS
On Dec. 21, just in time for the holidays, EMC bought SMARTS for $260 million in cash. The acquisition gets EMC into a market variously referred to as “event correlation,” “root cause analysis” or, slightly more commonly, network systems management.
The SMARTS technology brings to the table an ability to detect exceptions, identify problems, determines what may happen as a result of the problems and recommend a plan for correction. The value of identifying the root cause is that, because it identifies the cause of problems rather than just their symptoms, a single trouble ticket can be generated rather than the trouble ticket “blizzard” that so often is the indicator of a problem in a networked environment. When this works properly, managers are made aware of what needs to be fixed.
Root cause analysis is a particularly challenging situation when storage management software is asked to look at and understand events whose causes may lie outside of storage (on the network, or on a server, for example). When the SMARTS products become aware of the elements on a storage-area network, this is likely to happen.
It will certainly take a while for SMARTS products to make a contribution to EMC’s understanding of storage events, but perhaps that is not really the point. What is likely closer to the truth is that EMC now has a way to look at more parts of the enterprise than it did before, and has a better chance to become more than “just” a storage player.
This too looks like an excellent match for both parties.
Which merger will turn out to be the best? Remember Ferengi Rules of Acquisition No. 2: The best deal is the one that brings the most profit.
‘Tis the Season to Acquire, fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la!
