Does Veritas Misunderstand SMBs?

And there's more. Chairman and CEO Gary Bloom says his company's recent financial success is matched by its aggressive product rollouts during the past year. In addition to operating at its highest revenue capacity to date, the company has unveiled a number of key product releases during the past 12 months. They include Veritas i3 (the product acquired from Precise), Storage Foundation for Networks 3.5, NetBackup 5.0, Desktop and Laptop Option, Command Central 3.5, Storage Foundation 4, Veritas Cluster 4.0, Volume Replicator 4.0 and, last month, Data Lifecycle Manager 5.0.

But Bloom has bigger dreams: He believes Veritas can carve out a sizable niche as the only serious, viable, independent provider of utility-computing software that promises high-availability storage management, clustering and reliability. That should certainly create a company with revenue of at least $5 billion, he believes.

To get there, he needs you. A few hundred of you are already on board with the company, thanks in large part to the work of Michael Sotnick, vice president of U.S. channels, and Julie Parish, director of channels programs and marketing. Together, they have largely shaped and implemented Veritas' go-to-market strategy, at least as far as partners are concerned. On numerous levels, their strategies have produced significant results. For example, more than half of the company's sales now go through partners, up sharply from just a few years ago. To grow that figure more, the company is going to need to seriously increase its partner base. That will mean adding new allies with the wherewithal to take products more complicated than Backup Exec to every law firm, real-estate office, medical practice and light manufacturing company in the United States. That's going to require much more training and communication than what is currently available from the vendor, which has done well with very high-end partners that target the elite of Corporate America and small partners looking to make a buck selling Backup Exec.

But now comes the tricky part for the world's largest storage-software company, which employs 6,700 employees in 39 different countries. Like Cisco, IBM and Oracle before it, Veritas desperately wants to establish a greater presence among SMB customers. It wants to do that almost as much as it wants to establish itself as the de facto alternative utility-computing company to IBM, Oracle or some other vendor.

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Still, while his product portfolio is broad, Bloom concedes his company does not have everything to make utility computing a reality. No one company does, either, he notes. But with Veritas' building blocks, users can begin to ease their way to a utility-computing model. Storage, he notes, is a good place to begin. In most IT shops, storage is the closest thing that lends itself to the utility model because of how it is purchased, managed and deployed, he adds.

The net result of going down the utility-computing path, Bloom says, is the release of value from IT budgets. "One of the reason why we need utility computing is because IT has become too complex," he says. Despite consolidation, 20 to 25 vendors are still competing. Bloom expects more consolidation, pointing to the server market where Sequent, SGI and others used to play a much bigger role.

Veritas' pitch is compelling: Why not make room for the world's only hardware-agnostic, tier-one utility-computing player? After all, customers have one of everything, he notes.

That's true, of course, of very large customers, but not of smaller companies that I wonder if Veritas truly understands. At its recent partner conference, for example, Veritas' main message was all about utility computing, yet when I asked Bloom whether there was a threshold below which utility-computing doesn't really make sense, he said the bias of such technologies favored the enterprise customer, but that "smaller" customers shouldn't feel left out. "There's no reason why a $500 million to $1 billion company cannot do this," he says. "We have one customer, a start-up with a few hundred million in revenue, that's moving in that direction."

That leads me to ask whether Veritas truly gets small business, where its BackUp Exec product is so popular. You should wonder, too.