Veritas CEO Bill Coleman: Digital Transformation Requires A Platform For Information Management

In a world awash in information, just finding the right information and managing it is a difficult, but critical, task for businesses.

That's the word from Bill Coleman, CEO of Veritas Technologies, who told an audience of customers and channel partners during his keynote at this week's Veritas Vision conference that finding and managing information is the key to a successful digital transformation.

Lynn Lucas, Veritas' chief marketing officer, who set the stage for Coleman by recounting IBM's 2013 findings on big data: The last year has seen 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created daily, and 90 percent of all data in the world was created in the last two years. "In fact, that is just the beginning," Lucas said.

[Related: Sir Richard Branson: Using Information To Build A Business, A Brand And Corporate Culture]

The reality for companies is that the volume of data and the cost of maintaining it is becoming unsustainable, Lucas said. "Businesses have to learn to get rid of some of it."

Getting rid of some of the data, and managing the rest of it, is a complex task especially as the cost and risk related to data rise in the face of increased compliance and governance requirements, Coleman said in his keynote.

Veritas last year introduced the concept of a "digital twin" which encompasses all the data related to a person or business or other entity, Coleman said.

One year later, the digital twin is all grown up with massive amounts of data that is complex, sometimes invisible, and often hard to find, he said. "And if you can't find your digital twin, you can't track it, or harness it," he said.

This is especially true as businesses engage in their digital transformation, which is the next wave of computing, Coleman said. That digital transformation is happening in a fast-changing multi-cloud and scalable world, he said. "And technology fades into the background," he said.

Veritas is responding to the challenge by providing customers with new tools aimed at taking the complexity out of finding and managing data, particularly with its multi-cloud enhancements to its 360 data management portfolio, Coleman said.

The 360 data management portfolio, unveiled Monday, is based on a suite of seven products that manage data on-premises and in multiple clouds via partnerships with Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and IBM, with more to come, Coleman said.

"It's an end-to-end platform," he said. "We're the only company that has that. Our competitors are still stuck on point solutions."

Other new ways Veritas is tackling the information management problem is a new strategic partnership with Microsoft, making it easy for businesses to move data into and out of Microsoft's Azure cloud; the addition of 23 new data sources, from which Veritas technologies can find information to bring to its management technology; and a next-generation intelligent software-defined storage-based object store, he said.

Veritas' strength in the management and protection of information might surprise many people who still think of Veritas as an old legacy company that only recently came out of a much bigger legacy company, Coleman said.

Veritas separated from Symantec about 20 months ago, at which time the company saw the need to meet business interest in ways to cut IT costs, meet compliance and governance requirements, and invest in digital transformation, he said.

A focus on digital transformation was key not only to meet customers' business needs but also to transforming Veritas, Coleman said.

Veritas as a separate company was the world's top vendor of backup, recovery, and archive technologies, but its business was fading because of a perception of it being a legacy company, he said.

"So we came up with a plan," he said. "We said we have to spend more on digital transformation."