Bloom: Symantec-Veritas Merger Driven By Advanced Storage, Security Needs

That's the message from Gary Bloom, chairman, president and CEO of Veritas, to the nearly 3,400 attendees of the Veritas Vision conference this week in San Francisco.

Veritas previously has focused on mitigating risks that go with data access for such applications as data backup and recovery and server clustering, said Bloom. But, he said, customers are increasingly exploring new technologies to handle security, business continuity and compliance issues that surround the vast amounts of data they must manage.

To address those needs, Bloom suggests that customers look at utility computing as a means of turning storage infrastructures into automated services. "If you can drive out cost and complexity, it will help you drive innovation," he said.

These issues, combined with the needs to combat phishing, viruses and hackers, brought Veritas and Symantec together, he said.

"There's an absolute convergence going on between those that manage information and storage, and those that manage security," he said after his keynote Monday. "The common denominator is risk management. How do you become a compliant business? How do you meet the privacy requirements, and meet the requirements of records retention? How do you protect your customers' credit card information if you're not providing both security and availability of your information?"

Today, about 20 percent of Veritas' large accounts have someone dedicated to the issue of how availability, disaster recovery, compliance and security blend together, Bloom said. "So there is an absolute convergence," he said. "I think we're in the early stage of that trend."

On the channel side, Bloom said: "We're giving [partners] new capabilities, new routes to market and an expanded product portfolio. The conditions of the fundamental relationships will not change materially. Our channel strategy is to take the best practices from Symantec with the best practices from Veritas, put those two together, and have a better solution in the marketplace for them," he said.

The strategy is to integrate the two companies' channel programs under a joint leadership team, Bloom said, noting that many of the leaders of that team will come from Symantec.

"But remember, they have a consumer channel where we don't play to," he said. "And so we're not going to add a lot of expertise to one of the best consumer channel organizations in the industry by adding Veritas people to that. We think we have some good things we can learn from Symantec to offer a more consistent channel strategy to our enterprise channel partners."

Bloom said about 75 percent of the merged company's revenue will come from the enterprise side, while about 25 percent will come from the consumer side.

While Bloom did not detail any new Veritas software plans, he mentioned that Tuesday the company will introduce version 6.0 of NetBackup. That version will have an increased emphasis on data recovery. He also said Veritas will introduce Enterprise Vault 6.0, which will focus on archiving e-mail and other unstructured data.