Utility computing the way ahead for Veritas

By Stuart Finlayson in New York

Ahead of tomorrow's worldwide strategy and product announcements, Jose Iglesias, Vice President, Product Management at Veritas, dropped a few hints to the assembled world's media as to what they can expect from the storage software vendor during a briefing in Manhattan.

Iglesias said the thrust of the global launch - which is a first for the company and considered to be something of a milestone in its development - is the advent of utility computing, and how Veritas plan to enable its customers to execute a utility computing strategy.

Additionally, Iglesias pointed to an increase in its support for the application level, populated by the likes of SAP, PeopleSoft and Oracle.

"We are very focussed on the application layer as well as storage," said Iglesias. "Applications live on data and data is held in storage, which is our foundation."

Among the new products to be launched is a new version of the vendor's NetBackup data protection software (Version 5.0), as well as its new Desktop Lifecycle Manager, which protects information residing on the desktop from its receipt to its eventual disposal.

Iglesias also briefly discussed the release of Veritas' command central service - essentially a dashboard showing where storage is being used, in order to help pinpoint what parts of the enterprise would benefit from greater storage, as well as to determine if any areas are using inordinately high amounts of storage.

"Our paradigm is that we are hardware agnostic, and the heterogenous nature of our software is a vital part of our utility computing strategy."

He also touched upon the recent acquisition of Precise in terms of the tools it provided Veritas with to in turn provide an application management performance offering to its customers.

"[Enterprises] want to have an accountable service level, as well as the ability to measure and report on performance, and complete transparency in the sense of ease of implementation and subsequent management, so that it is automatic."

While Iglesias said the company felt it had all the components in place to go forward with its utility computing strategy, he did not rule out further acquisitions down the track.

"We have the product set to enable utility computing, but it is an evolutionary process and customer demands may change, but we will be listening to their needs and if we find that we have a component missing that we could get through an acquisition, we would certainly look at doing so. We have around US$10 billion in cash to enable us to do just that."

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