Pure Software Inc has acquired Atria Software Inc to form a combined software testing and development company in a deal worth more than $970m. The new company, Pure Atria Software Corp, is likely to have revenues of more than $100m this year. Pure’s president and CEO Reed Hastings will assume the same role at Pure Atria, and Paul Levine, Atria’s president and CEO will become chairman. The HQ will be in Sunnyvale, California, Pure’s current home. Under the terms, each Atria shareholder will be offered 1.5446 Pure shares. Pure will take a charge in its third quarter, the amount yet to be decided, and the deal should be completed by then. Hastings dubbed the deal a merger of stars as both companies are rising fast. Indeed, last year Pure managed to double its revenues to $44m and go public, raising $31m in the process. Atria’s revenues were up 93% to $40m last year. There will be no job losses, it’s a melding of high-quality high- passion employees gushed Levine. In fact, both companies were currently looking for about 100 new recruits. The pair claim there’s only one overlapping product area: defect tracking. As a result, Pure Atria will offer the PureDDTS product and migrate Atria ClearTrack users to PureDDTS and put some of the ClearTrack technology into it. Pure’s stuff is all about testing, or Automated Software Quality, as it likes to call it. Pure has most areas covered with the exception of GUI testing, where competitors like Mercury Interactive Inc specialize, while Atria leans towards configuration management. So Pure Atria may have to dip into the market again for GUI testing technology. It may not want to, however, preferring to cover all the other bases. The synergy between a testing and a configuration management company is not at first apparent and broad references to broader landscapes that Levine referred to don’t serve to make the picture any clearer at the moment.