On February 5, 2003, Computer Associates announced that it had acquired substantially all the assets of privately held Netreon, Inc., a maker of storage area network (SAN) management software. This was a cash transaction, although the price was not disclosed. Approximately 15 Netreon employees became Computer Associates employees, primarily from the development, management and marketing staff. A very small number of Netreon employees did not transition to Computer Associates.
The primary purpose of the acquisition was to acquire the SANexec Designer product, and the people associated with it. This product allows storage administrators to plan, design and document a SAN in an intelligent Microsoft Visio environment, producing not only an elegant SAN design, but also a complete bill of materials required to build the SAN that was designed.
SANexec Designer will be integrated in phases with the BrightStor product family, specifically with BrightStor SAN Manager, and will be branded as BrightStor SAN Designer. The initial integration will allow a storage administrator to compare a SAN designed with BrightStor SAN Designer to an actual SAN discovered by BrightStor SAN Manager, highlighting the differences. Further integration will include a common repository for the SAN data and policy automation that can take advantage of the information contained in the SAN Designer product.
The other Netreon product, SANexec Manager will be discontinued, but elements from it may be incorporated into BrightStor SAN Manager.
BrightStor SAN Designer will be sold through Computer Associates' direct sales force and authorized channel partners.
Evaluator Group comments
This is a good, strategic acquisition for Computer Associates. With the SAN intelligence provided by the SAN Designer product, Computer Associates can help customers focus more on meeting business objectives with storage area networks, and less on details of SAN components. We expect to see some very interesting SAN management functions from Computer Associates as a result of this acquisition.
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