Once Veritas Software Corp’s $400m acquisition of OpenVision Technologies Inc (CI No 3,078) is completed sometime in April, the name OpenVision and its Axxion product brand will disappear. The combined company plans to strike out for what it calls end- to-end storage management, stretching from applications to operating system to disk, using products from both sides of the house. It hopes to redefine storage management in the market, according to one Veritas executive. The company expects the Sun Microsystems Inc installed base to provide a large part of its revenue – both companies have aimed at that space with their existing products, and are working on Java products with Sun. They claim to own 80% of the Sun high-availability market between them. Ironically, that’s the one place where their product lines overlap: Veritas FirstWatch and OpenVision HA highavailability software do roughly the same job. The only office that will have to be merged is OpenVision’s Pleasanton, California headquarters into Veritas’ Mountain View headquarters. Elsewhere, Veritas is well represented across the US, where OpenVision isn’t, while OpenVision has a strong international presence. Veritas uses indirect channels, OpenVision’s route is direct. Only duplicated marketing and sales positions are being re-appointed – all OpenVision employees are being retained in the combined company. Why Veritas, which has traditionally kept a very low profile – its Unix file system and volume manager products go through indirect channels – has suddenly been galvanized into activity with its acquisition of OpenVision as well as the highprofile work on new Unix and Windows NT cluster file systems is not clear.
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