Veritas Bets Its Future on Partnerships

At its fifth annual Veritas Visions event, executives touted the company's 24 percent revenue growth in 2001 when most technology companies have been in the negative. Executives also highlighted how 86 percent of the world's Fortune 500 companies use Veritas' products.

"I would venture to say there is not another player that is over $500 million in annual revenues," says Bloom. "We are ahead of the game by a wide margin."

In recent months, Veritas has found itself coming up against the numerous startups hitting the storage market, particularly those using venture capital money to delve in management software. More important, veterans like IBM, Computer Associates, EMC and Compaq Computer have all publicly come forward with their strategy for this space. So this week, Veritas executives are outlining their offensive moves to fend off these competitors clamoring for their share of the storage management software space.

At the heart of the company's plans is its new Adaptive Software Architecture software and services model, which will make it easier to extend the entourage of Veritas products into both business-critical applications and storage hardware devices.

"We do not believe the software architecture exists without the respect for the hardware architecture," says Bloom.

Veritas' Adaptive Software Architecture is comprised of products with plug-ins (many already existing) for storage technologies such as virtualization, high-availability for fast applications, active Storage Resource Management for capacity allocation and data protection.

Sitting on top of business-critical applications and databases are various products for operations management services that include application uptime, disaster recovery global data management and capacity planning.

This new architecture will be oiled by the company's new industry-wide partner programs, called Veritas Powered and Veritas Enabled. Executives say the Powered program is geared toward supported established and emerging networking hardware platforms. Dovetailing this announcement, Vertias has entered into a strategic partnership with Cisco Systems to jointly deliver next-generation storage networking products. With this move, Veritas is positioning itself as more and more storage software intelligence moves into networks.

Considered a key component of the Adaptive Software Architecture, the Enabled program is designed to support numerous hardware and software vendors through a variety of efforts that include access to APIs, joint engineering development, integrated testing and cooperative customer support.

Bloom emphasized the importance of these partner programs.

"We just think they are absolutely critical to our success," he says. "It's that cross-industry support that is going to [dictate the success of that initiative."

Veritas has had partnerships before, but executives acknowledged they were a series of ad hoc efforts tied to individuals product moves.

"It worked just fine [but it is not a very successful approach," says Kris Hagerman, senior vice president of strategic operations.

Analysts describe Veritas as a very financially healthy company. Raymond Baquet, a vice president and research director at Gartner, points to various indicators, including its $1.6 billion in cash and more than $2 billion in current assets. The company also has a market capitalization of almost $11 billion.

"They have done a good job of managing the company in difficult economic times," he says. "This is a very healthy company."