Veritas Acquires Aptare In Bet On Analytics, Management For Hybrid Cloud

Data protection and management software developer Veritas on Wednesday unveiled the acquisition of Aptare in a bid to become a leading provider of technology to monitor and manage both secondary and primary storage environments.

Veritas declined to discuss financial terms of the acquisition.

Aptare, based in Campbell, Calif., offers a software suite -- Aptare IT Analytics -- which provides single-pane-of-glass insight into data across heterogeneous vendors, including physical, virtualized, and cloud environments.

[Related: Veritas Enhances Channel Program Profitability, Simplicity As Channel Chief Spicek Says Mantra Is 'Return On Partnership']

The suite includes Back Manager for ensuring data backups are done properly and in compliance; Capacity Manager to help manage capacity consumption and provide chargeback information for service providers; Fabric Manager to visualize an entire SAN topology; File Analytics to find duplicate or non-compliant data; Replication Manager to ensure storage replications are aligned with policies and service levels agreements; and Virtualization Manager for managing date in virtual storage infrastructures.

The Aptare technology supports capacity management across primary storage arrays from nearly every major storage vendor including Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, NetApp, IBM, and Pure Storage.

It also supports backup solutions from multiple vendors, including nearly all of Veritas' primary competitors including Commvault, Dell EMC, Rubrik, Cohesity, and Veeam.

Aptare also supports data reporting from disk to tape to multi-cloud environments.

With Aptare, Veritas will be better able to work with clients facing new regulatory and compliance environments including Europe's General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, the company said.

Aptare will help Veritas provide enhanced analytics and visibility into customers' entire infrastructure, including the ability to monitor data across multiple vendors and multiple clouds, said Barbara Spicek, Veritas' vice president of global channels and alliances.  

"With Aptare, Veritas has multi-cloud integration with all the cloud vendors," Spicek told CRN. "Aptare also not only strengthens those relationships, but also enhances our capabilities in VMware, OpenStack, and ServiceNow environments."

While Aptare brings value to customers' with heterogeneous primary and secondary storage environments, Spicek declined to discuss whether its acquisition by Veritas will result in any change in how competitors work with Aptare.

"I can't comment on actions by other vendors," she said. "The nature of the tool is to gain visibility over the entire environment. I can't comment on what the competitors would consider. We're focused on customer and partner value."

The acquisition of Aptare is quite the coup by Veritas, said Bob Swanson, vice president of sales at Vast, a Downers Grove, Ill.-based solution provider and a long-term channel partner to both vendors.

The wide range of data, both primary and secondary, supported by Aptare makes the company perfectly aligned with Veritas' business, Swanson told CRN.

"Veritas has been doing more with analytics and data visualization, and has been expanding the types of data it supports," he said. "Aptare fits the bill. It supports both Veritas and its competitors' products. This is a great grab for Veritas."

Swanson said Vast uses Aptare both as a tool for client assessments and for managed backup services, mainly in Veritas environments, but occasionally in non-Veritas environments as well.

"I'm not sure what Veritas will do with Aptare," he said. "But Veritas will now have a lot of capabilities for looking into environments controlled by its competitors. With Veritas now owned by private equity, this shows that Veritas is now going on the offensive."

Spicek said that the overlap between Veritas and Aptare channel partners is pretty big, especially in enterprise environments.

Over the next few weeks, Veritas will make Aptare products available to Veritas channel partners, and provide updated channel enablement including videos and updated training. Following that, she said, Veritas will work with joint platinum-level channel partners to discuss integrated planning.

Veritas, which was acquired in 2005 by security giant Symantec, was in 2015 spun off into an independent company.