Veritas gets into Utility Computing

NEW YORK: Storage software player Veritas Software Corporattion announced a series of products, which will not only provide the company a significant edge over competitors, but will also catapult it into a different league altogether — utility computing. Veritas is known as a traditional storage solutions — storage management, disaster recovery, and data protection company.

Immediately after ringing the inaugural bell for trading at the NASDAQ New York, Gary Bloom, Veritas chairman, president, and CEO launched the new products, CommandCentral Service, and at a press conference at the Reuters office. CommandCentral Service measures and reports IT resource consumption in any enterprise, and helps determine service levels and costs. "With this announcement we fulfill our commitment to enable organizations to move to a utility computing model, delivering backup, recovery, and storage as a service", said Bloom.

CommandCentral will allow CIOs resource groups in the IT department, define services, measure service levels and usage, and allocate costs based on usage. The new software is integrated with Veritas’ backup and recovery products NetBackup, and Backup Exec respectively. Plus, this solution can generate upto 75 reports that allow users to track service levels, performance and resource utilization. Pricing starts at $22, 000 and shipping will start immediately. According to Mark Bregman, executive VP of Product Operations, at Veritas, "With this solution, IT heads around the world will provide IT services to their users as a utility". Bregman claims that Veritas’ clients include 99 percenrt of the Fortune 500 companies.

Another product launched by Bloom, which will go a long way in helping enterprise users move towards utility computing was Data Lifecycle Manager, with the objective of meeting global regulatory requirements with respect to data management right from desktops to datacenters. For instance in the US there 10,000 regulations required, and records are expected to be retained for 20 yrears. This software will help organizations safely store data for as long as required, plus audit and keep track of changes made to data. This product is expected to begin shipping by the first quarter of 2004.

The strategic move by this storage solutions company to get into utility computing solutions is not only expected to become a major differentiator in the crowded storage marketplace, but is likely to take it closer to its end users, open up opportunities in high growth niches, enhance company growth rate, and maintain its leadership.

With revenues over $ 1.5 bilion in 2002, Veritas has been ranked among the top ten companies in the world in terms of revenues, and is the third largest in terms of market capitalization.

Ibrahim Ahmad, CNS, NewYork