Veritas CEO: Profiting from crazy, mixed-up IT

Aiming to put its financial restatements behind it, storage firm Veritas has launched an attack describing rival 'one-stop shop' vendor pitches as nothing more than a marketing gimmick.

Speaking to silicon.com at a user event in London this week, Veritas CEO Gary Bloom said: "Homogenous setups are rare. There are only a handful and they tend to disappear" - as companies acquire new businesses or get taken over, for example.

Veritas is known as a provider of storage management software, though every article on the company at the moment seems to focus on the vendor as a would-be provider of all sorts of management software, up against the likes of BMC, CA, HP's OpenView and IBM's Tivoli division, as well as a general 'utility computing' player.

According to figures from both Gartner and IDC, Veritas owns about a fifth of the storage software market, behind EMC, which last summer captured Veritas' archrival Legato at the start of a string of acquisitions that also saw purchases of Documentum and VMware.

However, Bloom, an executive and Larry Ellison deputy at Oracle until 2000, doesn't like such figures, as they include all sorts of machine-level software that come as standard with lines of EMC high-end and mid-range storage products.

Instead, these days he prefers to talk about what Veritas can enable, as part of any shift to utility models within IT departments. The company recently struck an alliance with BEA, a leader in application server software - a type of middleware that pulls together all sorts of IT systems - and a vendor he calls "a kindred spirit".

In app servers, many had assumed BEA would lose out long term as the likes of IBM, Oracle and Sun pushed their own software but many - including HP and Sun - eventually gave up on their own app servers and opted to partner with BEA, as IT departments expressed a preference for cherry-picking 'best of breed' software. Bloom sees parallels with the way in which large storage hardware vendors also work with his company.

And he reckons only two vendors truly have anything like the makings of a vertical software stack - IBM and Microsoft - and their dominance alone wouldn't be healthy for the industry, even if more users wanted a bill from a single vendor.

So Bloom and Veritas, while still mainly focusing on the nitty-gritty of functions such as back-up and recovery - notably recast in some people's eyes as archiving and retrieval, in these days of uber-compliance - are looking at other markets. And that carries risks.

"We will use the building-block approach," he said. "History has shown that the vendors that croak and die are those who abandon their old businesses [while pursuing new ones]. But we have refreshed all our products in the last 12 months - and the most difficult position to be in is a vendor that sits on its old business for too long."

Despite Veritas' recent successes - it is now profitable, reporting $103m in profits on revenue of $487m in its first quarter ended 21 April - two recent restatements of financial results loom uncomfortably in the background, weighing on a company that has managed to grow during the tech downturn, which was saw margins on storage hardware drop sharply.

Bloom accepts mistakes were made, mainly by previous managers, and everything should be lined up properly by this summer.

Does he ever regret leaving Oracle, one of those companies that has perhaps relied on a single product for too long?

"No, I wanted to be a CEO," he said. "But that role has changed - it now means a lot more time with accountants and regulators."