Utility computing begins with storage

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.

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