Veritas Rounds Out Storage-Management Offerings

Recently, Veritas outlined its strategy for utility computing, an old trend within the IT industry that has recently been reinvented. Veritas, which holds a 48 percent market share in backup, announced its intention to play in utility computing at its Veritas Visions event held in Las Vegas six months ago. Yesterday's announcement in New York was "less about strategy and more about delivery," says Jeremy Burton, chief marketing officer at Veritas.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company introduced its CommandCentral Service software, one of the company's first products to target utility computer. It has been integrated with Veritas Backup Exec and NetBackup technology to let IT managers create logical resource groupings, define services, measure service levels and usage, as well as allocate costs to various departments or users. This product maps IT resources to business views by geography, application and platform. Veritas plans to expand on this software to include server provisioning and high-availability features.

On the backup side, Veritas has updated its flagship NetBackup software with a new, 5.0 version that executives say works 78 percent faster in backing up data compared with the previous version. In addition, it works 37 percent faster in restoring data, says Veritas president and CEO Gary Bloom.

The new version has a synthetic backup feature that enhances restore times without the need for a full- fledged backup. Instead, it melds smaller backups into one. It includes a FlashBackup feature to enable quick backup and recovery of a large number of files. Veritas also is touting a desktop and laptop data-protection capability as a major new component of NetBackup. Both the Veritas NetBackup and the new, version 9.1 release of Backup Exec, a tool used for Windows-based servers, have a desktop and laptop option to automatically synchronize data among multiple machines with a single click. Veritas' Backup Exec is sold nearly 100 percent through the channel, while 65 percent to 70 percent of revenue from NetBackup is generated through the channel.

To help customers meet the new demands of the Securities Exchange Commission and health industry regulations that require companies to maintain data for specified time periods, Veritas introduced its Data LifeCycle Manager (DLM), formerly called NetBackup Storage Migrator. The company has layered a high-speed search engine and index technology over the original software's migration capability.

DLM, scheduled for general availability in the first quarter of 2004, also automates the placement and management of data in virtual archives across online, nearline and offline media storage through user-define policies. Because DLM is targeted at a company's need to adhere to government regulations, Veritas expects the product to have a narrow sales cycle, says Michael Sotnick, vice president of partner sales for the Americas. "There is going to be more revenue opportunity for our partners with the DLM [product]," he says.

What analysts found interesting about this product is the built-in, high-speed search engine, making it easier for customers to narrow their searches when trying to retrieve specific data. This could prove to be a resourceful tool, especially because companies are now required to save data, including e-mails, for up to seven years, says Diane McAdam, senior analyst and partner at Data Mobility Group.

"If you don't have a smart search engine, it's going to take a long time [to find archived data]," McAdam says. "When you think about seven years worth of e-mails, that can be pretty ugly."

Veritas reported $450 million in revenue for the third quarter, for 23 percent year-over-year total revenue growth. For the second quarter, Veritas reported revenue of $412.9 million.