News

Precise Buys W. Quinn

• By Scott Bekker
• 09/06/2001

Reston, Va.-based W. Quinn has for years marketed products designed for Digital Equipment Corp.’s OpenVMS and for Microsoft Corp.’s Windows NT/2000 operating systems.

Before Microsoft incorporated support for disk space quota management in Windows 2000, W. Quinn’s Storage Central product provided Windows NT administrators with crucial quota and storage management capabilities. In its current incarnation, Storage Central provides comprehensive storage resource management facilities for Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 Servers.

Precise, a purveyor of systems and application monitoring and management tools, was founded slightly over a decade ago. The Westwood, Mass.-based company markets an assortment of products which monitor and manage operating system, database, application server, ERP and other environments.

Precise CEO Shimon Alon says that his company expects to incorporate W. Quinn’s Storage Central into its existing suite of systems and application management tools. As a result of the acquisition, Alon’s company picks up a hefty strategic OEM partner – Microsoft itself – and also adds additional sales heft in the form of resellers Dell Computer Corp., EDS and Sunbelt Software.

Carolyn DiCenzo, a chief analyst for storage management research with Gartner Dataquest, says that the acquisition helps Precise fill a gap in its overall systems and application management solution set. “The acquisition brings together two leading technology players who now have the opportunity to leverage each others’ skills to supply the market with stronger performance tools to better address the storage part of the performance equation,” she says.

Precise’s Alon maintains that the acquisition should be a pain-free one because the relative strengths of the two constituent companies are complementary to one another.

“We just acquired a company that has the same philosophy as Precise … real-time, low-impact performance management …that’s why the synergy is so great between the two companies,” he says.

Nevertheless, analysts speculate that Precise could expect to face more than a few challenges in assimilating the corporate culture of a company with its roots in the no-nonsense world of OpenVMS and with more than 15 years of experience in enterprise software development.