COLLECTING DATA IS one thing, but managing it is another. During the last several years, Veritas has transformed itself into a billion-dollar entity by helping people collect data. Now under the leadership of recently appointed CEO Gary Bloom, Veritas is setting its sights on data management. In an interview with InfoWorld Editor in Chief Michael Vizard, Bloom identifies the business and technology trends that he thinks will take Veritas to $10 billion in revenue.

InfoWorld: How do you describe Veritas, and what are your immediate goals for the company?

Bloom: Veritas is delivering solutions in the marketplace that enable companies to have extremely high availability of their data and information. If you think about a traditional company, one of its key corporate assets is data. What we do is make that data highly available. That means we offer protection of the data, the reliable delivery of data, and lastly, the high-performance delivery of information. We're at a $1.6 billion annual run rate right now based on our last quarter of revenue, and our intention is to move the company forward to become a $5 to $10 billion entity. Veritas is one of the industry's best-kept secrets. We're probably one of the biggest software companies nobody's heard of.

InfoWorld: How will your growth happen?

Bloom: The way we'll get there is through our three-dimension expansion strategy. We'll continue to innovate and deliver new products to the marketplace and also sell more of what we already produce. The second dimension is our platform expansion. We support the vast majority of network switches, storage devices, and operating systems. What we're doing is expanding into the Hewlett-Packard and IBM environments as well. The ultimate goal is to support every network, operating system, storage provider, and server platform. The last dimension is our geographic expansion with a heavy focus toward our expansion in Asia. So far, we are staying ahead of the economic decline by expanding our business dramatically.

InfoWorld: What specific technology areas will Veritas focus on in the immediate future?

Bloom: When we think about expanding beyond our current domain, there's probably two or three areas that have a technology orientation that makes sense. One area is caching and getting data closer to the end-user. That brings about looking at any kind of technology that's used for immediate response and high performance right at the local user level. We're also looking at the orientation of data to applications and how storage has to get allocated to an application.

If you're deploying another hundred users on your CRM [customer relationship management] system, how do you decide which pieces of storage in your SAN [storage area network] should go to that? This is called intelligent provisioning. On a very intelligent basis, you can figure out which data modules are best allocated to an application in the SAN. We have opportunities to keep expanding into more application management and where the application and the data meet. Then probably the last area would be on the transaction management side. The ability to ship and receive transactions or messages requires guaranteed delivery with guaranteed performance. And that's what we do with data. Shipping transactions and messages isn't tremendously different than successfully shipping data.

InfoWorld: As you move toward providing data and storage management products across heterogeneous platforms, how will this change the way the company is perceived in tthe market?

Bloom: We think we have done a very good job of capturing what's referred to as the traditional storage management marketplace. The opportunity for us there is to take that platform and broaden it into a full high-availability architecture.

InfoWorld: Does this mean that hardware, especially servers, are now peripheral to the storage technologies?

Bloom: Being a software company, we always place a higher value on the software than on the hardware. To some extent hardware is getting commoditized. What's the key asset the customers are dealing with? It's not the server, it's not the hardware -- it's data and information. With the rise of SANs, the industry is broadening the distribution of data across heterogeneous environments. That's right in our sweet spot.

InfoWorld: What's really driving that? Has it been the advent of the Internet as a platform?

Bloom: The Internet drives the high-availability requirement because it eliminates time zones. Systems really do have to operate on a 24-hour, seven days a week basis, and they do need to operate with very, very high workloads. The other aspect of it is that in order to continue to achieve performance gains over time, the data needs to get closer and closer to the user. When we look out two, three, four years, maybe even five years, we see much more need for unique and different kinds of distributed data and caching models. Data itself will continue to be highly distributed. But the management of data and information will continue to be centralized, because of the difficulty in finding labor for each distributed location.

InfoWorld: How far along, then, are most customers in approaching their data storage requirements in this fashion? Is this happening now or will it take time to evolve?

Bloom: I don't think we'd be growing at this rate if customers weren't adopting these strategies already. We certainly have large customers that run in highly parallel, highly clustered environments to give high-availability access to their data so that they can have storage failures, they can have server failures, they can have operating system failures, they can have database failures and still get their data. Our projection is that through the end of the year, the deployment of SANs will become commonplace.

» posted by ITworld staff

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