7 January 2004 Storage software giant Veritas is to acquire utility computing software specialist Ejasent for $59 million in cash.
The deal follows a string of utility computing acquisitions during 2003, as well as a strategic shift at storage hardware maker EMC, which is moving decisively into software, to introduce ‘storage on demand’ based on utility computing principles.
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Ejasent is a private software company founded in 1998. Veritas says that it will continue to offer UpScale, Ejasent’s flagship software package, as a standalone product while it integrates the software into Veritas’ own technology. That is expected to take about a year.
“The core problem we solve is enabling server pools to be managed as a single, shared resource,” claimed co-founder and chief technology officer Rajeev Bharadhwaj. UpScale enables CIOs to draw upon processing power from this ‘pool’ and allocate it to different applications according to their processing needs. As a result, he said, both servers and storage devices can be more efficiently utilised.
“It’s another building block in our whole utility computing strategy,” Mark Bregman, Veritas’ executive vice president for product operations, told the Dow Jones newswire.
Ejasent is already a neighbour of Veritas in Mountain View, California. About a dozen of its existing 21 employees are expected to move to Veritas, but the company’s CEO and other executives will not be among them.
Veritas expects the deal to close by the end of January.
However, despite the $59 million price tag, Ejasent’s venture capital backers, which includes Sun Microsystems’ co-founder Bill Joy, will not be making a 1990s-style return on their investment. The company received some $40.9 million in funding from four VCs.
In addition to UpScale, Ejasent’s other packages include MicroMeasure, which provides cost allocation of IT resources based on usage, and virtualization technology which allows applications to be deployed to pools rather than specific servers, to utilize computing resources better.
