Veritas Software Inc has announced the acquisition of the assets of NuView Inc, specifically its ClusterX cluster management software for Windows NT. Terms of the acquisition were not revealed, but Veritas will take on 22 staff from Houston, Texas- based NuView.
Veritas called the acquisition a strategic addition to our portfolio of high availability software and said it would use the technology in combination with its Veritas Cluster Server product. ClusterX is claimed to be the first and only product so far to integrate the management of both Microsoft Corp’s MSCS Cluster Server (once known as Wolfpack) and the WLBS Windows NT Load Balancing Service. It will work with NT 4.0 Enterprise Edition, the future Windows 2000 Data Center Edition, and will support other cluster technologies, according to NuView.
Veritas has concentrated on Unix clustering with Cluster Server, and still has plans in place to extend Cluster Server to NT. But Dave Galiotto of Veritas told Computerwire that ClusterX would be used for those companies which preferred to chose Microsoft’s clustering rather than a competitive product. It plans to do some integration work between ClusterX and Cluster Server so that in the future users will be able to centrally manage mixed systems running Sun Solaris, HP/UX and Windows NT.
Aside from the technology, Veritas gets a clutch of ready-made OEM agreements established by NuView since the start of this year, the most valuable being Dell Computer Corp, which has recently begun shipping the product. Veritas already has extensive OEM agreements with Dell through both the Veritas and Seagate sides of its business. Other NuView partnerships are with Data General Corp and Unisys Corp.
It looks like history repeating itself for NuView. Back in 1997, founder and president Rahul Mehta sold off the company’s ManageX technology assets and staff, also around 20 people, to Hewlett- Packard Co, which paid approximately $100m. NuView re-emerged earlier this year with ClusterX (CI No 3,626). Both times, NuView was at a stage where it had some major deals in place and would need to invest heavily in its own infrastructure to support them. Except for Mehta and a few administrative staff, all NuView employees are now Veritas employees. NuView says it has no immediate plans to develop other technologies. Mehta will spend some time working with Veritas/NuView to help manage the transition of ClusterX between the two companies. Veritas, based in Mountain View, California, says it won’t move the ClusterX team from Texas.
