Veritas acquired storage monitoring software vendor Aptare on the advice of common customers and will integrate its features in NetBackup and other data protection applications.
Data protection market leader Veritas Technologies moved to beef up its storage analytics and monitoring capabilities by acquiring Aptare.
Veritas did not disclose the acquisition price when it revealed the acquisition on Thursday. Both companies are privately held, although Veritas is a multibillion-dollar-a-year vendor, and Aptare is a minnow in the storage world.
Aptare IT Analytics is a suite of products that includes Storage Management Suite, Backup Manager, Capacity Manager, Fabric Manager, File Analytics, Replication Manager and Virtualization Manager. Its design goal is to provide predictive storage analytics and help companies meet requirements for compliance and service-level agreements.
Veritas CEO Greg Hughes said his company will sell Aptare IT Analytics as a complement to the Veritas NetBackup and Backup Exec data protection applications and InfoScale storage management for on-premises and cloud data.
Hughes said Aptare came highly recommended by some of his largest customers who already used IT Analytics alongside Veritas products.
"I found some of our customers are using a product called Aptare," Hughes said. "It provides a single pane of glass, not only for NetBackup, but for pulling insights from other technologies.
"Our customers were saying, 'You should really think about buying this company.' After a few times, I started getting more interested in Aptare. I met with [Aptare CEO] Rick Clark last year and got a demo. Aptare works very well with NetBackup and some of our other products."
Greg Hughes
He said Aptare's capabilities go far beyond NetBackup OpsCenter, which provides basic analytics. "Aptare is a much more advanced product," Hughes said.
Hughes praised Aptare for its storage analytics, reporting and monitoring capabilities for data on premises and in public clouds. He also said the acquisition will lead to a common reporting platform for data stored on tape, disk and across multiple clouds.
Aptare claims its products include more than 200 standard reports and allow customers to build custom reports.
Veritas' plans for Aptare product, team
Our customers were saying, 'You should really think about buying this company.'
Greg HughesCEO, Veritas
Veritas will keep the Aptare brand for IT Analytics and continue to sell it as a stand-alone product. Hughes said Veritas is still considering the long-term roadmap regarding the integration of Aptare technology inside Veritas products.
Clark founded Aptare in 1993 and remained its CEO and president until the Veritas acquisition. Hughes said Clark and the Aptare team will join Veritas. Clark will report to Scott Genereux, Veritas' executive vice president of worldwide field operations.
Aptare, based in Campbell, Calif., claims more than 1,000 customers for IT Analytics, formerly known as StorageConsole.
Hughes said Veritas will continue Aptare's partnerships with IT vendors. Hitachi Vantara sells Aptare IT Analytics as Hitachi Storage Viewer through an OEM deal. Aptare is also part of the Hewlett Packard Enterprise Technology Partner Program, and it sells Backup Manager Solution for ServiceNow.
Aptare is Veritas' second acquisition since its 2016 spinout from security giant Symantec. It bought fluidOps, a Germany-based cloud data management startup, in March 2018.
Hughes, who became Veritas' CEO in January 2018, said the company will look for more acquisitions for products that complement its portfolio.
Although Veritas is the largest stand-alone data protection vendor, it competes with well-funded, smaller companies that are also hunting for data intelligence and cloud features. Veeam Software, Rubrik, Cohesity and Actifio all picked up $100 million or more in funding over the past year. Several said they would use the money to make acquisitions.
"We're in a market where we can't do all the development ourselves," Hughes said. "If we find products or technologies that are important to underpin our value, we're looking at that."
Predictive analytics is a hot driver for storage acquisitions. On the primary storage front, Hewlett Packard Enterprise spent $1.2 billion to acquire Nimble Storage in 2017, and has integrated Nimble's InfoSight analytics into other HPE hardware. DataDirect Networks identified Tintri's storage analytics as a major reason for acquiring Tintri in 2018. For secondary storage, analytics must also extend to public clouds.
"As long as systems management remains one of the major costs in IT, one of the keys to an efficient hybrid strategy lies in automation based on a combination of dynamic visibility and intelligence," said Steven Hill, a senior analyst at 451 Research. "You simply can't control what you can't see."
Christophe Bertrand, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, said Aptare IT Analytics adds "intelligent data management" to data managed by Veritas applications.
"In this case they decided to do this non-organically to accelerate time to market," Bertrand said of the acquisition. "I expect that we will see Aptare's IP being leveraged in other parts of the portfolio in the next few quarters."
Symantec sold Veritas to the Carlyle Group for $7.4 billion in January 2016, more than 10 years after it acquired Veritas for $13.5 billion. Veritas executives have said the storage software vendor was never a good fit as part of Symantec and have worked to restore its strength as a stand-alone company. Veritas executives claim the company generated more than $2 billion in revenue in 2018.
Greg Hughes
