History 2002: Veritas Buys and Sells SRM Unit of NTP Software

The 2 unrelated transactions were announced only a week apart.

First, Veritas Software acquired the SRM unit of NTP Software, then sold off its desktop and mobile solutions activities to Sonic Solutions.

Why would Veritas, which boasts several hundred of the best software engineers in the US and India, feel the need to look to NTP for StorageReporter, the SRM software it was missing?

“We had to make a decision to buy or to build,” answers Lindsey Armstrong, Veritas SVP EMEA, also explaining that the company’s SANPoint Control product can now be enhanced with greater storage reporting functionality.

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

Founded in 1994 in Manchester, NH, NTP will now focus its activites on another software line, Quota and File Sentinel, a policy engine that controls use behavior in the storage environment.

According to NTP, this product is integrated with StorageReporter, and Veritas intends to maintain this relationship going forward.

On the other side, Veritas’ sale, for $9.2 million in stock, is simple to explain. The company, more comfortable in enterprise software, has never been particularly successful with this low-end segment of the market, and never committed significant resources to change that fact.

A glance at the list of software titles that were sold quickly explains Sonc’s interest, as a firm specialized in DVD authoring applications:

• – RecordNow for CD and DVD burning, RecordNow Max for mastering,
• – Drive Letter Access for drag and drop optical disc burning,
• – Simple Backup and Backup MyPC, for data protection and DR.

Some of the CD and DVD recording software ended up at Veritas following the latter’s acquisition of French firm Prassi Europe last year.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 178 on November 2002 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.