Investors To Acquire Symantec's Data Protection Business for $8 Billion
Long wishing to exit the business of backup and recovery and high availability to focus on IT security, Symantec today said it has agreed to sell its Veritas business to private equity firm The Carlyle Group and Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC for $8 billion in cash. Carlyle has tapped Bill Coleman, BEA Systems founder and CEO as Veritas chief executive, and former 3Com Chairman and CEO Bill Krauss was named chairman.
The moves will end a decade in which Symantec and Veritas never seemed to find the symmetry they were seeking when Symantec acquired the server and storage management and data protection software provider in 2005 for $13.5 billion. Symantec last year said it was creating two separate businesses with the data management business to retake the Veritas name. The transaction is expected to close by the end of the year.
Once the transaction is complete, products such as Backup Exec, NetBackup and Cluster Server will no longer carry the Symantec name. As Veritas reenters the data protection market it will find numerous new competitors who have already spent years going after the business run by Symantec, among them Acronis, ArcServe, Asigra, CommVault, Dell, EMC, IBM, NetApp, Veeam, VMware, Unitrends, Vision Solutions and Zerto.
It also remains to be seen what Veritas' new owners have in store for the business such as en eventual sale or IPO. For its part, Symantec said it plans to use the proceeds to shore up its security business.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 08/11/2015 at 2:02 PM