Packeteer Makes Server Consolidation Play With Tacit Acquisition

Packeteer on Tuesday unveiled plans to buy Tacit Networks in a move that will add server consolidation to the vendor’s WAN optimization strategy.

With the $78 million acquisition, expected to close this quarter, Packeteer will fold Tacit’s lineup of branch office acceleration appliances into its WAN optimization portfolio. Packeteer and South Plainfield, N.J.-based Tacit have been working together since September, when they formed a partnership for joint development, support, sales and marketing.

While Packeteer’s PacketShaper appliances are designed to improve bandwidth control and performance, Tacit’s IShared appliances use Common Internet File System, Wide Area File Services (WAFS) and caching to boost application performance over the WAN.

Improved WAN performance enables customers to pull servers out of branch offices and consolidate them in central data centers without losing application performance for branch users, said John Fomook, director of worldwide marketing at Packeteer, Cupertino, Calif.

In addition to the Tacit acquisition, Packeteer is forming a strategic relationship with Brocade Communications, continuing an OEM partnership that Brocade had with Tacit. Brocade, an investor in Tacit, OEMs Tacit’s product line to form the WAFS piece of its Tapestry offering and acts as an OEM distributor of Tacit’s software to other vendors, Fomook said.Packeteer plans to begin training some of its 200 U.S. channel partners on Tacit’s products next week during its partner conference in Washington D.C., Fomook said. He declined to specify the number of channel partners Tacit has but said it’s “not a lot.” Because of the partnership with Tacit, Packeteer expects the consolidation of the companies and their channel efforts to proceed quickly, he said.

The acquisition will ease support of solutions that include products from both vendors and should open the door to a one-box solution in the future, said Tim Hebert, COO of Atrion Networking, a Warwick, R.I.-based solution provider that works with Packeteer and Tacit. Atrion deploys Tacit’s product line primarily to improve the performance of Micosoft applications over the WAN, he said.

“I see this as taking two companies that I enjoy working with, combining them into one and giving me a better product set to go to market with. So I’m very excited about it,” Hebert said. “It does seem like a natural evolution.”

Packeteer plans to announce its product strategy for branch-office application delivery in June, Fomook said, adding that the company will consider ways to merge the Packeteer and Tacit product lines and capabilities.