Veritas Announces Utility-Computing Intentions

• Also: Veritas bolsters its partner program
• Veritas sees itself as solid player in this potential market -- one in which IBM has "on-demand computing" and Hewlett-Packard has "adaptive computing" -- not only because its products specialize in application availability and data protection, but because of the recent products it acquired with its purchases of Jareva Software as well as Precise Software, a deal that is expected to close within 60 days.
• Bloom, who also is president and chairman at Veritas, emphasized that his company is not trying to be the "public utility" for customers, but intends to help customers -- through a series of storage management products -- turn their IT departments into an "in-house utility." This can be accomplished through the use of tools that enable cost-savings through policies, automation and applications that can be fine-tuned for performance.
• "We are not trying to be the utility," said Bloom, as he faced a room full of national and international journalists. "We are enabling the utility."
• During his keynote speech, Bloom took some time to boast about the company's financial performance in recent months. For instance, Veritas ended 2000 with an overall revenue performance of $1.18 billion. In 2002, the company grew to $1.51 billion in annual revenue. In the fourth quarter of 2002, the company documented its largest quarterly growth in its history with an increase of $405.7 million.

• In the first quarter of 2003, the company experienced its second largest quarterly growth with an increase of $394.4 million. The company also has increased its employee count from 4,784 at the end of 2000 to 5,647 at the end of 2002. Blooms says Veritas plans to use 17 to 18 percent of revenue to reinvest in engineering, while most technology companies invest about 10 to 13 percent of revenue into engineering.
• "A lot of companies have had massive layoffs," Bloom said. "While they are going to spend time rebuilding, we are going to spend time investing in growth."
• Bloom also highlighted another part of the company's financial strength: It has gone from $1.25 billion in cash reserve to $2.39 billion. "We are just in a great [financial] position," he said.
• Plans To Expand
• On the product side, Veritas plans to expand its reach into the application layer and servers as well as working with companies like Cisco Systems to build more management intelligence into the network. The Precise acquisition gives it a tool that helps IT managers fine-tune the performance of their database applications. Those products, called InSight for database applications, as well as the Precise StorageCentral Storage Resource Management product, are currently available through Precise but will be integrated into Veritas' portfolio after the deal is legalized. The Jareva purchase, which is a completed deal, gives Veritas provisioning capabilities.
• With these acquisitions, Veritas plans to create automation systems that can diagnose problems and head them off before they become serious. For example, if a Web server machine is running out of CPU cycles, Jareva automatically can provision the server and hand it off to the Veritas Cluster Server to manage -- without intervention from the administrator.
• In beta now, one of Veritas' newest products -- called Service Manager -- helps to define, deploy and report on storage service-level agreements. For example, the product is a portal in which a storage administrator can set up the availability and performance characteristics for an application. An administrator can set policies for particular applications, like RAID levels, or high-performance cache, or data replication for a particular array. This Service Manager will be available to the general public in the second half of this year.
• In the next 12 to 18 months, Veritas will be spending time integrating many of these pieces into a more unified portfolio.
• "I'm not talking about a three-year window here," Bloom said. "Next year, you will see very tightly integrated technology."