Veritas and Microsoft expand alliance

Lisa Baertlein

PALO ALTO: Veritas Software Corp. on Monday said it expanded a partnership

with software giant Microsoft Corp. in a move expected to augment Veritas'

customer base and be "incremental" to revenue.

Mountain View, California-based Veritas was built on storage management

products for UNIX, an open operating system that runs computers and servers and

competes with Microsoft's proprietary Windows system. Microsoft's Windows 2000

operating system now embeds technology from three Veritas storage management

products.

Those products simplify the difficult and time-consuming task of backing up

and managing information on databases sold by Oracle Corp., International

Business Machines Corp., Microsoft and others. In addition to insuring that data

are always available to users, Veritas' products guard against data loss due to

crashes and other mishaps.

The end goal of the companies' expanded alliance is to build new software

tailored for Microsoft's SQL database and ship it next year, said Frank Artale,

vice president of Veritas' Windows division. "SQL will run better, faster

and be more highly available when it's running on a Veritas foundation,"

Peter Levine, Veritas' executive vice president of strategic and platform

operations, told Reuters.

"It's a whole new market opportunity for us," said Levine, who

added that the deal would be "incremental" to Veritas' revenue, but

would not disclose details.

Robert Horsley, executive director of Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen & Loewy

(FDBL), said the software makers' expanded partnership should have a positive

impact at his global immigration and nationality law firm.

The firm uses Windows in its 22 offices around the world and has built

extranet portal sites for each of its large clients - including Reuters Plc.

"We see SQL playing a significant role in our future," he said.

If something goes wrong with the FDBL's technology and information does not

reach portals, clients are more likely to assume there is a problem with their

case - so data availability is a high priority, Horsley said.

"It certainly makes the statement that the data in your SQL database is

protected in an enterprise-class way," said Bill North, research director

at IDC, who agreed that the Veritas-Microsoft partnership will make the

management of storage used for SQL databases easier and more straightforward.

"This is all good news," he said.

(C) Reuters Limited 2001.