Veritas and partners share the same Vision
Veritas and partners share the same Vision
Oct 14, 2004: The road to utility computing and the elements to be added along the way formed the core of the discussion at the first Veritas Vision conference to be held in Australia.
Around 500 delegates - made up of partners and customers - gathered at the Sydney Exhibition and Conference Centre in Darling Harbour on a gloriously sunny day to hear leading Veritas executives outline how the company was delivering on its promise of making the concept of utility computing a reality.
Among the partners exhibiting at the event were Princeton Softech, Peribit, Net App, Sun, Telstra, Dell, Enstor, DiData, Quantum, XSI, StorageTek, Microsoft and Cisco.
Utility computing allows organisations to align application service levels with business unit requirements and provide complete cost transparency.
"For too long, IT managers have dealt with negative business perceptions that IT services are too slow and inflexible to support a fast-moving and changing environment," said Bruce Lakin, managing director for Veritas Australia and New Zealand. "Today's business world demands an IT services delivery model that is completely standardised, automated and secure - where usage costs are transparent across departments, individuals, and the organisation's applications."
The audience heard how the concept of utility computing was resonating with the company's large enterprise customers, with many already investing in technology such as Veritas' CommandCentral, which offers systems administrators greater visibility of how storage is being utilised, allowing them to impose fair and reasonable service level agreements with their individual user groups.
Highlighting the recent acquisition of email archiving vendor KVS, Art Matin, executive vice president of worldwide sales at Veritas, said the pace of the market was the driving force behind Veritas' bid for KVS.
"We actually were very interested in the space and had been for a long time, so we had some of our own products that we were developing to address the needs in that area, but we saw the traction that KVS was gaining, with 900-plus customers worldwide, and the very positive report that came from Gartner. We just got more engaged at that point and thought the market for archiving and compliance and discovery is a rapidly growing one and that we needed to accelerate our entry into the market.
"Every time you look at your product portfolio you are always doing a build versus partner versus buy analysis, and in this case we had been developing some of our own solutions but as I say we saw the market developing much more rapidly than we could develop a solution that was as good as KVS'. Also, the value proposition and the marriage between our core data protection products and the archiving solution on top of it is a very logical extension."
Despite Veritas having made around half a dozen acquisitions inside the last few months, Matin was keen to stress that Veritas were not becoming a company that looks to grow only through acquisition.
"If you look at the companies we have bought recently, only two of them (Precise and KVS) had significant revenue streams and customer bases. The others were acquired to round out a particular to round out a technology stack."
Commenting on the recent financial hiccup which prompted a restating of the company's financial results after Veritas' own internal auditors identified irregular accounting practices, Matin said the company had come though that period unscathed in terms of customer confidence in the company's financial machinations.
"We have enjoyed 22 percent year on year growth for the first half of this year, so that shows an increase in customer acceptance and interest in our value proposition."
Steve Leonard, senior VP and general manager Asia Pac/Japan at Veritas, added: "[The restatement] was really about what was acceptable accounting practices in previous years, rather than anything inappropriate going on. It really needed to be redefined to be more in tune with how we've always done things."
Below are some pictures from the conference
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