Veritas Touts New Storage Management Certification Program
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Veritas' Gray Bloom: Ability to manage heterogeneous environments is key.
The testing initially will focus on data protection and high availability, said Anthony DeCicco, senior vice president of global professional services at Veritas, during a briefing at the Veritas Vision 2002 partner and user conferences here. Future plans call for certification in data replication, disaster recovery, business continuance and storage area networking, he said.
Veritas does not expect to restrict certifications to a limited number of solution providers, DeCicco said. He estimates that about 200 solution providers will be certified by year-end. The certifications will allow partners to assess and deploy Veritas products to customers, but they can still choose to resell Veritas' professional services, he said.
Hank Johnson, vice president of infrastructure solutions at Stonebridge Technologies, a Sun Microsystems and Veritas solution provider based here, said the certification plan can help solution providers that understand the importance of storage management for a heterogeneous infrastructure. "We want to scale our business to what customers need and then to what the vendors have to offer," he said.
STRONG MARKS FOR VERITAS
% of SPs citing each choice
BASE: 100 responding solution providers in March 2002
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SOURCE: CRN Monthly Channel Satisfaction Survey
Derek Gamradt, vice president of engineering and CTO of StorNet, an Englewood, Colo., storage specialist, said the addition of certification marks the first time Veritas has a comprehensive partner plan that includes all of the traditional elements: certification, revenue commitments, commensurate margins locked in to specific sales commitments and geographic coverage.
Veritas also has reasserted its leadership position as a provider of storage management software capable of managing heterogeneous environments. Gary Bloom, chairman, president and CEO of Veritas, said in his keynote that the full range of Veritas storage management products,including database management, clustering, data replication, backup and restore, volume management, SAN management and file-system management,are available for Solaris,
HP-UX and AIX, as well as almost all aspects of the Windows environment. Support for Linux is planned by the end of 2002, he said.