Symantec to Acquire Relicore

Symantec to Acquire Relicore

Extends Symantec’s Data Centre Management Capabilities

Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Relicore, Inc., a leading provider of data centre change and configuration management solutions. Relicore’s flagship product, Relicore Clarity, is the industry’s only configuration management solution capable of automatically discovering, mapping and tracking changes to application and server components in real time.

The acquisition of Relicore is a key step in Symantec’s creation of an integrated solution for standardised, simplified data centre management. The transaction is expected to close in mid-February 2006.

“The application and server environment in most enterprises is growing and changing so fast, it has become dizzyingly complex,” said Kris Hagerman, senior vice president of the Server and Storage Management Group, Symantec.

“Meanwhile, due to 24x7 performance demands, cost pressure and internal and external compliance requirements, it has never been more important for IT organisations to understand what is in their data centres – and control it. The combination of Relicore’s unique, real-time configuration management capability with Symantec’s existing server management and storage management capabilities will allow IT managers to fully understand their application and server environment, and actively manage it.”

Relicore’s Clarity product discovers all applications running on managed servers, tracks key configuration information, maps the dependencies of those servers and applications and keeps all of that information up to date on a real-time basis.

This allows customers to replace the time-consuming and error-prone process of manually collecting and maintaining asset inventories, and accelerates troubleshooting efforts by helping IT managers identify when a particular change to the server or application environment has created a problem.

This capability is crucial given that, according to IDC, 78 percent of server downtime is due to infrastructure changes. In addition, customers apply Relicore’s Clarity to more effectively and efficiently manage their compliance with regulatory requirements, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, by discovering and mapping the resources associated with financial reporting systems, and ensuring the policies associated with those systems are continuously enforced.

“Relicore provides the only real-time discovery, mapping and change tracking technology in the industry,” said Vic Nyman, president and CEO, Relicore. “We look forward to combining our configuration management offering with Symantec’s leading provisioning, availability and performance management products to provide customers with an integrated, powerful solution for data centre management.”

Configuration Management Complements and Extends Symantec’s Current Offerings
Adding Relicore’s configuration management technology to Symantec’s existing products will allow customers to gain greater visibility and control over their data centre assets and improve their efficiency and effectiveness in managing those assets. Customers will immediately benefit from a variety of solutions that combine Relicore’s Clarity with other Symantec offerings, allowing customers to:

- Automate server management through use of Relicore’s configuration management and Symantec’s VERITAS OpForce server provisioning product. Customers can utilise OpForce to automate server and application deployment and then apply Relicore’s change tracking capabilities to ensure the integrity of server configurations as well as maintain compliance over time.

- Improve application and database availability through use of Relicore configuration management and Symantec’s VERITAS Cluster Server clustering offering. Relicore’s change tracking capability will reduce downtime due to environmental changes while ensuring primary and secondary nodes maintain identical profiles, reducing a major source of cluster failures.

- Resolve performance problems through use of Relicore configuration management and Symantec i3 application performance management product. Together, these two real-time tools will enable IT organisations to correlate performance degradations with the configuration changes that caused them, resulting in even faster resolution of performance problems.

In addition to these immediate areas of synergy, there are a variety of other areas that offer promising opportunities for deeper integration. For example, by leveraging Relicore’s technology along with its leadership position in host-based storage management, Symantec will allow customers not only to better understand their server and application environment, but also to better understand the storage that is connected to those servers.

Moreover, configuration management is being viewed by many enterprises as one of the critical – and growing – linkages between the domains of security and IT operations. If a company is to respond on a timely basis to protect its IT environment from security vulnerabilities, the security and IT operations teams must work in tandem to establish policies for secure configurations of servers and applications – and then ensure that those policies are actually implemented and adhered to.

Through the integration of Relicore technology with Symantec’s security compliance offerings, companies will have the ability to effectively bridge the worlds of security and IT operations to deliver a data centre operation that is more secure, more reliable and more available.

While the synergy with other Symantec offerings is significant, Relicore’s Clarity also will continue to be offered on a stand-alone basis as a leading solution for customers interested in integrating configuration management technology with third-party software and IT process improvement initiatives, including ITIL implementations, IT service management software deployments and change management and incident support process improvement projects.

Symantec plans to continue, and to expand, Relicore’s partnerships with third-party software vendors such as those Relicore announced with IBM Tivoli, HP OpenView and Peregrine.
Availability
Relicore Clarity will be available as a stand-alone solution through Symantec’s sales organisation and channel partners in early April 2006, assuming that the acquisition closes as scheduled.

About Relicore, Inc.

Founded in November 2000, Relicore delivers award-winning data centre configuration management solutions that provide unprecedented insight into today’s complex, distributed enterprise application infrastructures. The company’s flagship product, Relicore Clarity, is an automated configuration management solution for discovering, mapping and tracking changes to applications and distributed systems with real-time accuracy.

Leading companies such as Allmerica Financial, Cisco Systems, Hughes Network Systems, JP Morgan Chase, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, T. Rowe Price and UniGroup rely on Relicore Clarity for managing their complex application environments. Relicore, Inc. is headquartered in Burlington, MA and was represented in this transaction by Jefferies Broadview. For more information, visit www.Relicore.com.

About Symantec

Symantec is the world leader in providing solutions to help individuals and enterprises assure the security, availability and integrity of their information. Headquartered in Cupertino, Calif., Symantec has operations in more than 40 countries. More information is available at www.symantec.com.
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