ITGumbo: spicing IT up

News
Globes reported last week that there are rumors circulating that Symantec is considering selling Precise Software Solutions, which operates in Israel. The article speculates that interest might be coming from "one of the major enterprise software houses interested in improving its position in the enterprise IT systems performance market."

Background
Precise Software Solutions was taken over by Shimon Alon, Ron Zuckerman and Aki Ratner in 1997 and within 6 years the company went from making $10 million to $100 million under their management and the help of Gemini Israel funding. The company went public in 2000 and was sold to software storage provider, Veritas, for over $600 million in 2004. In 2005, Veritas was bought by Symantec. Under Veritas and Symantec, Precise has been able to keep its Israel operations independent, though its management has changed (many moving on to enterprise software supplier, Attunity).

What it does
Before being sold, Precise was considered the leader in application performance management, with its Precise i3 being its most successful product. Now known as Symantec i3, the software "helps organizations improve business efficiency and mitigate costs by quickly identifying and resolving potential bottlenecks within an application infrastructure," by providing "IT managers with a comprehensive set of end-to-end performance management tools that will allow them to pro-actively monitor, analyze, and fine-tune their applications to attain increased application transaction performance and high availability service levels for their organizations."

Market and Future
The Globes article lists some of the major IT companies that are active in the market that may have fueled the sales speculation. In general, some competitors in the application management solutions industry include IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard (HP), and EMC.

The idea of Symantec selling Precise to any of these companies doesn't have a clear basis. The industry is still growing and Symantec i3 has been leading the way. Revenue numbers for Symantec's security and data management sector grew in 2006, with Veritras (including Precise) products contributing $410 million. The fact that the security and application management industry is currently as hot an area as it is and with other big companies looking to get a share by acquiring smaller companies in the field, should provide enough reasons for Symantec to keep Precise off the sales block and out of the hands of its competitors.

Additional Resources
Veritas-Precise merger
2001 Interview