The
Acquisition Drive Continues
There’s
been no let-up at all in the interest in larger and more
successful software vendors in buying software and technology to
deepen or broaden their portfolios, increase their customer base,
or enhance their ability to serve their target customers.
Sometimes we have one of those “where will it all end
moments?” when we think we’re going to end up with one or two
or three giant software companies owning it all, but then we come
back to our senses and remember that a lot of new software gets
born outside of the big company environment.
Regardless of resources, ideas don’t get born on a
schedule. So we
suspect this untidy process of things getting started in one place
and then ending up somewhere else is likely to continue.
It does make for great charts.
IBM
IBM
has purchased two companies recently.
Its Information Management group, which has been steadily
adding to its software portfolio, had purchased Venetica, a
provider of enterprise content integration software that will
allow IBM to integrate unstructured text from multiple sources
into its DB2 Information Integrator environment.
Supported platforms include FileNet, Documentum, Open Text,
and Stellent.
This
will allow business organizations to include the 85% of their
business information that is in unstructured data to be
incorporated into their business decisions more readily, improve
business insights and increase compliance with governance rules.
In
the last three years, IBM has added six acquisitions to its
Information Management group, headed by GM Janet Perna, including Informix,
Alphablox, CrossAccess, Green
Pasture Software, and Tarian.
Venetica,
a private company with some 70 employees, is expected to be
integrated into IBM’s existing Information Management group.
The deal is expected to close in October.
IBM
has also purchased a Danish computer services firm, Maersk Data,
and an outsourcing business owned by Maersk and a partner. Maersk Data provided IT services to A.P. Moller-Maersk
Group, a large supplier of freight and oil.
This will allow Moller-Maersk to concentrate on its core
businesses while permitting IBM to oversee and fund the growth of
Maersk Data. When the deal closes, it is estimated by European sources
that IBM will have a 30% share of the Danish IT services market;
and will nearly double IBM’s presence.
Veritas
Veritas
plans to acquire KVault Software Limited (KVS), a provider of
e-mail archiving software for $225 million in an all-cash deal.
This will permit Veritas to offer customers the ability to store,
manage, backup and archive corporate e-mail and data, enabling
organizations to address regulatory compliance and decrease
storage management costs.
KVS
software allows policy-based archiving of business critical
information held within Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint,
Microsoft Office and file systems.
Archiving infrequently accessed information with KVS
software enables organizations to more easily manage storage
growth in their e-mail environments while reducing associated
hardware and management costs.
Such archiving and indexing simplifies the process of
search and discovery so that in the event of a regulatory inquiry,
administrators can quickly discover and deliver items of interest
in a fully automated fashion, minimizing disruption to the
business.
The
acquisition is expected to be complete by the end of September.
The 200 KVS employees will continue to operate as a
separate unit under the leadership of the current KVS management
team.
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