Veritas CEO: Veritas to bloom on EMC's buy

As EMC closes its deal to acquire storage software vendor Legato Systems Inc., Veritas Software will continue to benefit from its independence in the market, said Gary Bloom, CEO of Veritas at a technical conference in Beijing, China.

Bloom said the acquisition will not change the dynamic storage market or Veritas' market position. He noted Legato brings only about 10 percent of the market share to EMC, and is ranked fourth in the storage market after Veritas, IBM and Computer Associates International.

"But it (the acquisition) eliminates Legato's independence as a software company," he said. "It is now associated with a hardware agenda, which makes it very difficult to sell." In addition, Bloom said the consolidation has reduced the number of independent storage software vendors and strengthened his company's independence. He added neutrality provides a better position for interoperability, as compared with other hardware vendors who tends to provide software that works best with their machines.

Commenting on the company's own moves into the application performance management (APM) arena through the acquisition of Precise Software Solutions, Bloom said it is a natural extension into an adjacent market. It has also raised attention among the CIOs, who tends to focus on applications, he added.

"CIOs don't (usually) pay attention to infrastructure," said Bloom. "(The expansion) elevates our roles among the CIOs as a company that will drive performance in applications and infrastructure." Shimon Alon, senior vice president and the former CEO of Precise, said i3, Precise's application performance management flagship product, detects and corrects problems in the application layer. The acquisition completes Veritas' vision to be an enabler of utility computing. Alon added the first phase of integration is taking place and it is expected to complete in a few months time.

Veritas is also expanding its support for Linux. Since January 2001, the company has launched the Linux version of its backup software, virtualization software and recently the clustering software. Ranajit Nevatia, director of Linux Strategy at Veritas, said the company is targeting to allow all its products running on some version of Linux by end of 2004.

With a high cash availability of US$2.4 billion, Bloom said his company has a strong appetite for making acquisitions and investments for geographical expansion.

In China, the company currently has 120 employees and one technology support center in Beijing. Bloom said the company is anticipating an engineering center in China, but no specific plans were made available.

He added currently about 30 percent of product development is down overseas, through centers in U.K., Israel and Punai in India.

In terms of revenue, he said the overseas markets contributed about 39 percent and Asia Pacific, including Japan, brought in about 10 percent of the corporate income. By 2006, Bloom anticipates this contribution to move up to 50 percent for the global market with Asia Pacific's contribution to rise to 15 percent.

• Bookmark this page
• Share this article
  •  
  • facebook
  • slashdot
  • digg
  • Reddit
  • stumbleupon
  • linkedin
  • twitter
• Got more on this story? Email Computerworld
• Follow Computerworld on twitter

• Share
  Share this article

  •  google+
  • facebookfacebook
  • slashdotslashdot
  • diggdigg
  • RedditReddit
  • stumbleuponstumbleupon
  • linkedinlinkedin
  • twittertwitter
• print
• email
• Bookmark