Veritas Touts Federal Agency Commitment

"We're incredibly committed to the government market space," said Paul Smith, vice president of the government opportunities division at Veritas, at the get-together in Washington.

Veritas already has gotten commitments from federal customers such as the National Imagery and Mapping Agency and the National Security Agency.

The vendor's utility-computing strategy could be of particular interest to federal departments, said Jeremy Burton, chief marketing officer at Veritas, Mountain View, Calif. "In the same way electricity networks tap into economics of scale, if you can pool your storage and services together, you can lower your IT costs over time," he said.

Veritas has products that can help apply the utility-computing model to storage and application performance management, company executives said.

Another emerging opportunity for Veritas partners is helping clients deploy technology that will prevent network problems before they arise, Burton said.

"If you're worried about margins, consider [offering] diagnostic services," he said. "Things crash because we don't monitor them at a granular enough level. Raising the flag when something's broken is the easy part."

The acquisitions of Jareva Software and Precise Software this year brought Veritas new technologies for improving the performance of various applications and for automating fixes that can head off problems before they become severe.

DLT Solutions, a Herndon, Va.-based solution provider, presented the seminar along with Veritas,the first time that the vendor and one of its partners jointly led such an event.

"We're [Veritas'] largest federal reseller," said Craig Abod, president of DLT, whose customers include the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Patent and Trademark Office. DLT expects to do about $230 million in sales this year, he said.

The new technology that Veritas attained in the acquisitions of Jareva and Precise represents "an opportunity to go back [to] a customer and introduce more [products] to help bring it all together," Abod said. "I can't go and sell the same copy of Backup [Exec] every year."