Precise Software has 6,000 customers, has increased its revenue for 20 consecutive quarters, and is comfortably profitable. For its third quarter, ended Sept. 30, 2002, Precise reported net income of $1.1 million on sales of $19.4 million, compared with net income of $452,000 on sales of $14.3 million in the same period last year.
And the goods for sale? Application performance management (APM) software, which monitors and analyzes all the vital components of an IT infrastructure, from servers, storage, and applications, to root out performance degradation before it affects response times.
In a spending crunch, just about the only thing CFOs are willing to loosen the purse strings for is technology that makes the existing infrastructure work better. Precisely what Precise does. [Ed. note: All right, all right, could you be any more gushing?!]
That said, there's always the possibility that Veritas could botch the integration of Precise's products and staff. But my hat's off to CEO Gary Bloom for getting the deal done.
Meanwhile, note that Mercury Interactive (Nasdaq: MERQ), a competitor of Precise, trades at around five times its 2003 revenue forecast. It's safe to say APM is sizzling hot. Mercury, currently trading at $30 and change, reported revenues of $282 million for the first nine months of 2002, and CEO Amnon Landan expects annual sales to grow to $1 billion in three to five years. Another takeover target in the wings, surely?
To realize the benefits of cloud-native software, an application must actually be cloud-native—designed to run in the cloud, interacting with disaggregated cloud services, fully manageable as code—to deliver the expected benefits.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
