History 2000: For $192 Million, EMC Nabs Softworks

With considerable cash reserves at hand, EMC is continuing its shopping spree. Not long after getting its hands on Data General in a stock transaction worth about $1 billion, it has now acquired Softworks for a $192 million cash tender offer.

Founded in 1977, Softworks was originally specialized in MVS software, and now also delivers solutions for NT and Unix. It’s star product, CenterStage, enables centralized software management across heterogeneous platforms in a SAN environment, obviously a raw for EMC.

The Hopkinton, MA company has been eyeing Softworks for a while now. The earliest discussions date back to December 1998, but the key moment came in a telephone conversation between EMC’s CEO Mike Ruettgers and Softworks COB Jim Cannavino last October, which led directly to a decisive meeting between the executives of both companies on November 4, 1999.

In the end, it wasn’t EMC but it’s wholly-owned subsidiary, Eagle Merger Corp. (with the same initials) that acquired all the outstanding shares of Softworks.

The latter attained sales of $37 million for the first 9 months of 1999 (+37% over the same period in 1998) for a net income of $946,000 (compared to losses of $243.000 a year earlier).

The enterprise storage management software firm has 6,700 licenses of its products in use at 2,000 installations WW, among which are 88% of the Fortune 100 companies, and has offices in Australia, Brazil, France, Japan, Germany, Singapore, Spain, and the UK.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 144 on January 2000 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.