IBM To Resell Veritas Software To Channel

Under a four-year renewable agreement, IBM will offer Veritas Cluster Server, Storage Foundation, Storage Foundation for Oracle RAC, and Storage Foundation for Databases. The Veritas offerings will fill out IBM's portfolio of xSeries and BladeCenter solutions for Red Hat and Suse Linux, as well as for Microsoft Windows. IBM will offer the Veritas products sometime this fall, the companies said.

This will mark the first time a Veritas product will appear on IBM's price list, said Sanjay Poonen, Veritas' vice president of strategic alliances.

The agreement gives Veritas access to IBM solution providers and sales reps, who will now be compensated for selling Veritas products, said Poonen. He said Veritas will also compensate its own sales reps, avoiding conflict with IBM sales reps or VARs.

"This VAR access to the market is a significant new channel for us -- a new greenfield opportunity," Poonen said.

Don James, CEO of Bear Data Systems, a Belmont, Calif., solution provider, said the move is important for customers in heavy IBM shops, but not as significant for others.

"IBM has done a good job with its support contracts and services," James said. "This move means one less phone call in the middle of the night if there's an outage."

Rob Sauerwalt, global brand executive for IBM xSeries servers, said the agreement will allow IBM partners to offer an entire solution. "Instead of cobbling together one part from here, one from there, they can get it all from IBM," he said.

The deal does not include Veritas' backup software such as Backup Exec and NetBackup, which are already available via IBM Global Services, said Poonen.

"There is some conflict with these products and [IBM's] Tivoli software," he said. "So we decided to focus on products for which there is not conflict at IBM."

IBM has other relationships in the clustering space, including a technology relationship with Microsoft Cluster Services and a resale agreement in the Linux space with Palo Alto, Calif.-based SteelEye Technology, said Sauerwalt. "I'd look at Veritas as the preferred offering in the portfolio," he said.