Veritas CEO: Merger Of 'Two Great Assets'

Veritas Software CEO Gary Bloom is set to become Symantec's vice chairman after the two companies' merger deal closes. In an interview with Editor In Chief Michael Vizard, Bloom expounds on the factors that drove the merger with Symantec. Here are some excerpts:

CRN: How far along are you in terms of thinking through the channel strategy for the combined Symantec-Veritas?

BLOOM: When it comes to sales, and the channel in particular, we can't have that many discussions until the deal actually closes. But how we approach, say, a Fortune 50 company and a small- to medium-[size] enterprise company is probably going to be different. There's probably going to be more opportunity to consolidate relationships at the high end—although if you look at the channel, most of the partners already sell products from both companies.

CRN: Given that, are you doing anything to provide incentives to keep key people in place during this process?

BLOOM: Of course. That's a standard part of integration planning. By and large, employees on both sides have embraced the transaction. They get the strategic nature of it. This is not a deal like IBM and Lenovo, where you have billions of dollars in cost synergies, or Oracle and PeopleSoft, where it's about all the layoffs. This is about combining two great assets—not gutting one of them, but leveraging each other to solve bigger problems.

CRN: Another view might be that neither company has enough clout or size to truly compete in the enterprise market. Did that factor into the merger thinking?

BLOOM: That's the 'glass-half-empty' view of it. The 'glass-half-full' view is that we are both successfully addressing the market from consumer to enterprise, but together we're stronger. We certainly get more enterprise capability together, and we solve bigger problems for customers.

CRN: Does Veritas need a Linux-based offering for the SMB market beyond allowing those systems to back up files to Windows servers?

BLOOM: We have NetBackup that already runs in the Linux environment. But most Linux deployments are in enterprise accounts. Small- to medium-[size] businesses are not experimenting with Linux today.

CRN: How is your approach to utility computing different?

BLOOM: Our approach is around building blocks that enable people to do utility computing. What you're hearing from everybody else is that the customer has to buy it all from them, rip and replace everything they've got and then they, too, can have utility computing. We're saying utility computing is something you evolve to over time.