Veritas' Vision

Down the road, Veritas,which embraces a take-no-prisoners corporate direct-sales culture in the mold of Oracle,aims to offer predictive technology that anticipates storage and applications problems and automatically adjusts to accommodate. Veritas, which does about 55 percent of its sales through the channel and has managed to combine a strong direct-sales effort with a solid base of solution providers, is stepping up its channel effort with additional training and certification. And Bloom has promised partners that Veritas is not interested in building a services and consulting force that could compete with them. Veritas' top tier of loyal partners have applauded the moves and said they expect to post sales gains of 20 percent to 30 percent this year.

Veritas' climb higher up the software stack, however, comes with the storage software wars reaching a fever pitch. Computer Associates International, EMC, IBM and even Microsoft are all moving hard into the dynamic provisioning software arena. Just last week, IBM acquired Think Dynamics, a provisioning software company (see story on page 84), and EMC unveiled two Web-based storage management applications (see story on page 22). The wild card is Microsoft, which will offer server provisioning as part of Windows Server 2003 beginning in the third quarter. Bottom line: There will be a battle royale for the hearts and influence of tens of thousands of solution providers.

Bloom says Veritas would rather have a "higher quality base of partners than a broader brush of partners." He adds: "It is not always a game of quantity. It is a game of quality." Bloom needs to remember that solution providers are solving thorny storage problems in multivendor environments and, in the process, are creating demand for products that absolutely no vendor can match. What Bloom has to ask himself is: With a market-share battle looming, does Veritas have the right channel strategy?

Is Veritas' Bloom seeing clearly? Let me know what you think at (781) 839-1221 or via e-mail at [email protected].