Two shortcomings of Veritas

Last week was time for Veritas Vision, again taking place in Las Vegas.  This is the company’s annual user love fest, and if size counts when it comes to love fests then Veritas is doing well, as the company reported more customers attending than ever.  The company is also pouring 16% to19% of its revenue back into R&D, a large number by industry standards.

Last week was time for Veritas Vision, again taking place in Las Vegas.  This is the company’s annual user love fest, and if size counts when it comes to love fests then Veritas is doing well, as the company reported more customers (3,000 in total) attending than ever.  The company is also pouring 16% to19% of its revenue back into R&D, a large number by industry standards.

This year’s theme was “one step closer to utility computing” and with its recent acquisitions of Ejasent and Jareva, plus the continued development of the CommandCentral product package, Veritas has made substantial progress. 

The company’s strategy is to provide users with a shared multi-vendor infrastructure and automated management that enables a predictable set of service levels.  Veritas is building into CommandCentral key functionality for getting to a utility computing environment.  Generally categorized, these are solutions for discovery, consolidation, standardization, automation and service.  This all makes a lot of sense.

Is Veritas able to deliver utility computing environments now though?  Hardly.

The company is certainly an industry leader with many of its products, but two shortcomings are immediately obvious when we look at the Veritas corporate strategy.

First, although it is increasingly looking beyond storage to remain competitive in enterprise IT (remember its acquisitions of Ejasent, Jareva and Precise Software to give it capabilities for application virtualization, operating system virtualization, and application performance management), it has a gaping hole in its strategy when it comes to security.

I asked CEO Gary Bloom about this last year, and again last week, and got the same non-answer each time: Veritas has no interest in managing security.  Huh?

Naturally, no company can logically be expected to provide everything in IT, but given the importance of data, and given also the increased understanding of the threat to data that comes from inside the firewall, it’s a topic that cannot be ignored. It is a curious thing that a vendor trying to provide a utility computing model – which by definition must make data, assets and services pervasively and flexibly available – can ignore this.   

It is equally hard to understand how any IT shop driving towards utility computing can ignore a threat to its data, whether that data is at rest in a storage environment, being used, or in transit. 

A second shortcoming that appeared at Vision is that, at least at a strategic level, Veritas evidently has no understanding of what its competition is doing.  Why else then would it have claimed (wrongly) to the gathered users that the major differentiator between its products and those of its competitors is that Veritas products accommodate heterogeneous storage environments while its competitors (specifically referring to EMC, HP and IBM) are dedicated to creating a solution stack from a single provider? 

Veritas’ claim that an ability to manage across many vendors’ products is a differentiator that distances Veritas from its competition is patently false.  To varying degrees, all its competitors do this.

It is certainly true that each of the three vendors mentioned above would prefer to sell its hardware solutions only, and it is even truer that each would be happy as a clam to displace another vendor’s hardware at every opportunity.  But these companies, like everyone else in the industry, also realize the fundamental truth that they need to coexist with friends and competitors alike in the enterprise IT center.  As a result, each supports SMI-S to provide compatibility and interoperability with other vendors’ products, and each provides capability for managing in heterogeneous IT shops.  IBM products speak to EMC products, and vice versa.

Either Veritas’ competitive intelligence is faulty in the extreme, or the marketing team has been overly cavalier as it positions is messaging against its opposition.  Either way, there is little excuse for this sort of thing.  Misleading statements such as these are a disservice to Veritas customers, and detract from the credibility of a company that otherwise does many things right.  

Next time, a look at some of the things Veritas is doing right.