Veritas has agreed to buy privately held application virtualisation technology company Ejasent for $59m (£32m).

California-based Ejasent's two core products - UpScale and MicroMeasure - are aimed at utility and on-demand computing, widely tipped as the future of e-business.

In an all-cash deal due to be completed by the end of this month, Ejasent will become part of Veritas' high availability and clustering group.

Ejasent has 13 patents pending, 10 of which are in application virtualisation. Its products are currently sold through partnerships with Sun and EDS, who also use them.

"I buy into Veritas' strategy for trying to grow into a multibillion-dollar software business. It is a good story," said Tony Ruane, sales and marketing director ar reseller RedStor. "[RedStor] has been able to gain success from [Veritas' recent acquisitions] Precise and Jareva.

"My only concern is the company might be taking too much on. Veritas has its hands full with the previous acquisitions."

UpScale can move a complete application, with its pointers and data, around systems in a data centre while running live. It does this using an abstraction layer between the operating system and the applications.

"This means non-disruptive application migration. It is a unique piece of technology, very important to the concept of virtual computing," said Dr Chris Boorman, Veritas vice president of marketing for EMEA.

"Previously, when recovering from a snapshot backup, it was necessary to restart the application which meant a delay. This now happens automatically, on the fly."

Ejasent MicroMeasure will meter usage by individuals of physical and logical data centre assets such as servers, storage and application transactions.

Veritas will use the software to enhance its CommandCentral Service, improving cross-enterprise service level reporting.

Both products will ship under the Veritas brand in the second quarter. MicroMeasure is available on major Unix flavours, Linux and Windows. A Linux version of UpScale, currently only available on Solaris, has been slated for early 2005.

Last year Veritas bought Precise Software for application measurement and Jareva for auto-provisioning of servers. Ejasent's products are entirely complementary, said Boorman.

Veritas is due to announce its full 2003 results on 27 January. Its turnover in 2002 was $1.5bn, and the last four quarters were all records in the company's history.