Prasanto K Roy
LAS VEGAS: If you thought Veritas offered only storage solutions, think
again. It now calls itself, "The leading provider of heterogeneous software
to enable utility computing." And according to the company this utility
computing is different from the systems vendors’ version.
This was highlighted at the company’s annual Vision seminar in Las Vegas
and Jeremy Burton, Veritas CMO and Senior VP, emphasized, "Storage is a
great place to start, to make the move to utility computing."
A year ago, Veritas was the storage software leader. This year, it has
dropped to second place, with 22 percent of the global storage software market
($1.78 billion: IDC) in Oct-Dec 2003. The newly merged EMC-Legato combine is at
the top with 32 percent before Veritas and is followed by CA at 10 percent and
IBM and HP in that order
The IT Dept is the Utility |
Does the "utility computing" mean an external supplier offering services to the enterprise? Not quite, in Veritas’ vision. The storage software company says that the final goal is: that the Storage is the closest thing to utility computing that exists in IT Bloom's 5 steps to utility computing: |
Veritas is not diverging or leaving behind storage. Asserts CEO Gary Bloom to
CyberMedia News, "It’s a great business to be in and we’re absolutely
committed to storage…it’s a key part of our business. We’ve been on an
expanding path in going beyond storage for a number of years now, from
clustering to provisioning and more…it’s an expansion strategy.
In all fairness, Veritas outlined its "utility" vision and strategy
a year ago, at last year’s seminar. This year, the tag line says:
"Utility. Now". "We’re delivering on that vision," Bloom
said. "We’ve had a year of execution."
That "delivery" included today’s product announcements, two
additions to Veritas’ CommandCentral family- the 4.0 versions of its Storage,
Availability and Service products. CommandCentral Service, for instance, is a
software portal that "provides transparency into IT resource consumption,
service levels and costs".
Veritas has brought in new version to most of its products within the past
year. The complete family of CommandCentral software products sell for US
$64,000 upward, individual products are at $20,000 upward.
Support for heterogeneity was a key part of Veritas’ strategy. In a
commissioned survey, 98 percent of CIOs said heterogeneous environment support
was essential. It reflected the reality of their IT assets, and also gave them
the freedom to shop around and more bargaining power.
Bloom also said that a number of partners have been getting
"increasingly closer" to Veritas and its view of utility computing
over the year, Bloom said. Among them are Network Appliance and Sun
Microsystems. CTOs and senior managers from these companies are scheduled to
speak at the event on their vision of utility computing.
Some of these "partners" are also competitors. Veritas competes and
cooperates with them. Said Bloom, "We’ll compete and they’ll win when a
customer says, I want an HP environment and only HP utilities. We’ll win when
the customer says, I want a heterogeneous environment."
CyberMedia News