Storage Management Software: Veritas Earns a Victory

Winner and still champion for its storage management software for the second year in a row is Veritas Software. But the category in the 2002 VARBusiness Annual Report Card (ARC) survey was tightly packed behind Veritas, which posted an overall score of 71. EMC and Computer Associates tied for second, only two points behind Veritas, followed by Hewlett-Packard and IBM's Tivoli brand, which tied for fourth at 68.

Report Card Score

With a leading score of 78, VARs' loyalty to Veritas was one reason the storage company edged out EMC and CA. But Veritas also posted impressive scores in the product innovation subcategory, earning top marks in four criteria: richness of features, innovation, compatibility/ease of integration, and overall revenue/profit potential (where it tied with HP). EMC won by a single point in product quality/reliability.

In the support subcategory, Veritas scored 69 in a tie for first with EMC, which posted first-place scores for postsales support and quality of tech support. For the presales support criterion, Veritas tied with CA for first. One of Veritas' worst scores, however, was for marketing support, where the software vendor came in fourth, behind CA, HP and EMC.

As far as partnership, VARs found little to distinguish the five vendors. EMC, CA, HP and Tivoli all tied for first with scores of 65 in the overall subcategory, while Veritas came in a close second, with a 64. On the individual criteria comprising that subcategory, Tivoli posted wins in service/sales partnering and channel conflict, while Tivoli, CA and HP tied for first on their solution-provider programs. HP posted a win for communication with its partners, perhaps a credit to its efforts to keep VARs informed during and after the merger with Compaq. HP also had the best e-business portal, while Veritas scored as easiest company to do business with.

Picking the right storage-management vendor is important because the storage-software market will begin growing again next year, according to Carolyn DiCenzo, chief analyst of storage management software at Gartner/ Dataquest. Gone are the heady days of 30 percent growth, she says, but 2003 should see 11 percent growth, and by 2006, the storage- management-software market should grow to $8.6 billion from $4.9 billion in 2001.

"It's a hot space," adds Don Foster, Veritas' vice president of partner sales, North America. "Businesses today are still managing a lot of data in very complex IT environments that are difficult to change, so in a resource-lean environment, you need products that enable you to repurpose your storage usage for efficient utilization, as well as software that helps you reduce your IT-management costs. Our product set does that."

One of the key changes Veritas made to consolidate its leadership in storage management was to provide differentiation for its partners based on their investment in Veritas' practice,

Foster says. "We now have a set of authorization criteria centering on training and certification," he says. "This allows our partners who make investments in Veritas competency to differentiate their value from other resellers%85[which] means more margin for them."

Like other segments of the troubled IT economy, the picture for storage management vendors has not been pretty. EMC, for example, saw its software license revenue decline $360 million from the first half of 2001 to the first half of 2002, while Veritas saw an $85 million drop in license revenue for storage products over the same period, DiCenzo says.

"This is a survival year more than anything else," she says. "All this uncertainty%85has impacted corporate buying, and terrorism has paralyzed a lot of companies as they try to understand the impact on the economy moving forward."

But because people are storing more data than ever before, the storage-management market will eventually pick up, she adds. Even with the decline in pricing, most storage software is based on capacity, and that continues to grow.

Peter Jordan (peterjordan@mindspring.com) is a freelance writer based in Franklin, Tenn.

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