Private equity firm The Carlyle Group (CG) announced this morning that it is acquiring data storage and server management business Veritas from Symantec Corp. (SYMC) for $8 billion. Helping to finance the deal will be GIC, a sovereign wealth fund in Singapore that also is an investor in Carlyle Group funds.
The newly-independent company will be led by CEO Bill Coleman, the founder and former chairman and CEO of BEA Systems (now owned by Oracle). Its new chairman will be Bill Krauss, a Carlyle operating executive who previously served as chairman, president and CEO of 3Com (now owned by Hewlett Packard).
No word yet on the equity-to-debt ratio, but debt financing will be provided by a large group of banks that include BofA Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, CUBS and Jefferies.
According to a report yesterday from Reuters, Symentec had been seeking to sell Veritas for “several months, but interest from potential buyers was limited because of a tax burden associated with splitting the company.”
Mountain View, Calif.-based Veritas generated around $2.5 billion in revenue last year.
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