Storage: ‘The big shift to software’

It’s a big, fast-growing tech area for the enterprise. You can figure just

how hot storage is, from all the key execs moving there. Some have gone to

storage startups: Enrico Pesatori, Compaq’s former chief of enterprise

products and services, is now CEO of BlueArc. Dick Watts, HP’s former systems

and sales head, is at Net-storage service provider Scale Eight. But the company

that Gary Bloom, former No. 2 at Oracle, moved to as CEO last year is an

established one that dominates the storage management software segment.

The California-based $1.5 billion Veritas Software Corp is a global Top 10

software company, and it’s drawn on execs from all over. Such as a CTO of

Goldman Sachs, various CIOs, execs from systems and software companies.

Yesterday, it announced that former Oracle senior VP Jeremy Burton was joining

as chief marketing officer.

And all with good reason. Storage is the biggest thing happening today, for a

cash-strapped infotech industry strapped with vanishing margins on hardware.

While most infotech companies declined last year by revenue, Veritas grew 24 per

cent, grew to almost half the data backup market, and maintained high positive

gross profit margins. "The value in storage has shifted from hardware to

software," Bloom says.

At its Vision 2002 seminar in Dallas, Texas, in the USA on April 30, Veritas

announced its new "adaptive software architecture", a software and

services model aimed at reducing storage complexity for large enterprises, and

improving IT responsiveness to changes in business and technology. It also

launched an industry-wide "Veritas Enabled" partner program to

simplify management of multi-vendor storage. The program is supported by Compaq,

Dell, EMC, HDS, HP, IBM, and Sun, and covers solution integration, joint

testing, validation and cooperative support.

Storage complexity is almost a given in today’s enterprise. Businesses are

storing more and more data. Even with server and storage consolidation, they’re

also distributing and caching data locally, to improve availability and response

time. Global corporate storage needs are doubling each year, with storage

expected to grow into a $100 billion industry in 2005. And storage and security

were the only areas that grew post September’s terrorist attacks.

For systems vendors such as HP and Sun, storage is the big area of growth and

profitability, and they are thus increasingly stepping in, taking market share

from traditional storage systems vendors such as EMC. Veritas, however, is a

software company, and has very little competition in its space. It creates the

software that manages storage systems, solutions and networks, the glue that

holds enterprise data together, manages it, replicates and backs it up, and

recovers it when required. Competitors such as EMC and IBM are mostly storage

vendors, and simply do not match the range of Veritas' products.

But with storage getting bigger for systems vendors’ bottom-lines, how long

is it before they step further into storage systems, and software? "That’s

not so easy!" CEO Gary Bloom told Cyber News Service. "You’re right…

systems vendors might want to now turn around and say, I’m now a software

provider. But they have a big challenge. Customers don’t want software to

manage one particular hardware environment. They want software to manage

multiple environments. It’s very difficult for the systems vendors to do that,

to go and cooperate with their competitors, for a start. So today, all the

storage and systems vendors without exception support Veritas technology."

According to Bloom, the big trends and issues in the industry are server

consolidation, self-service applications, and the very scary state of affairs in

disaster management business continuity. "Over 70 per cent of companies

have no tested, working business continuity plan," he says. Post 9-11,

though, companies are far more aware of the need for these, and these are

opportunities that storage technology companies have been addressing.

Veritas products span data protection, disaster recovery, storage

virtualization, storage area networks and application availability, and are

responsible for storage management in four-fifths of Fortune 500 companies.

Veritas has been responsible for integration in the AOL-Time Warner merger of

diverse storage systems and networks. Among developments this year have been

announcements of support for Linux, and now, IBM’s Unix (AIX).

And Veritas is embarking on an ambitious "Veritas Powered" program,

aimed at an array of network devices from Cisco, Rhapsody and others with

embedded Veritas software in them. The software will take care of storage

functions such as virtualization more effectively, making large, advanced

storage networks easier to manage.

Veritas has 5,700 employees in 36 countries. Its development is in two

countries–the United States, and India. Its Pune development center houses

some 350 people, and does "core, strategic development for Veritas, not

just some routine porting of applications," according to Veritas Corp’s

executive VP Paul Sallaberry. "We have a highly motivated workforce in

India, which has stayed with us."

Prasanto K Roy in Dallas, Texas