Symantec Makes Data Center Bid With Relicore Buy

Relicore&'s flagship product, Relicore Clarity, competes against enterprise data center offerings such as IBM&'s Collation software, which IBM acquired last November, and Mercury Interactive&'s data center change management software.

If the deal closes in mid-February, Relicore Clarity will be available as a stand-alone offering through Symantec&'s direct sales force and channel partners in early April. Up until now, about 90 percent of Relicore&'s sales have come from its small direct sales team and a handful of channel partners. The value of the average Relicore deal ranges from $150,000 to $200,000.

Relicore Clarity locates all applications running on managed servers, tracks key configurations, maps the dependencies of those servers and applications, and keeps that data current on a realtime basis.

Kris Hagerman, senior vice president of the Server and Storage Management Group at Symantec, said the data center opportunity is enormous for enterprise-focused VARs. “Any sizable data center has got to have the ability to understand what is going on with its servers,” he said. “We feel very strongly that every one of the Global 5,000 should have this capability.”

Symantec plans to expand Relicore&'s partnerships with third-party software vendors such as IBM Tivoli, Hewlett-Packard OpenView and Peregrine.

Rory Sanchez, president of SL Powers, a Symantec and EMC solution and managed service provider based in West Palm Beach, Fla., said he is looking forward to evaluating the Relicore offering. “We will absolutely look at this,” he said.

Sanchez said he sees Symantec building out its storage footprint with additional acquisitions in the wake of its blockbuster Veritas acquisition last year. He also sees Symantec increasingly going head-to-head against EMC.

“Symantec and EMC are on a collision course,” he said. “We are definitely going to look at both. EMC has been a very good partner, and we&'ve been a partner with Symantec for a very long time.”