Veritas Vision conference shows company evolving

When you hear the name Veritas you probably think of storage software. Although it’s been more than a year since Veritas acquired Precise Software, an application performance management company, APM probably doesn’t come to mind. I recently attended Veritas Vision, the company’s user conference, and it appears that the transformation from a pure storage software company to one that includes APM is an evolutionary process, and not a big bang.

At last year’s Vision conference, as a follower of APM I was very disappointed when the tagline for the conference was “storage redefined.” This signaled to me that APM was being viewed upside-down at Veritas – in the context of storage, rather than in the more strategic view of storage in the context of its value to the business.

I’m glad to report that there was progress at this year’s Vision conference; the tagline was stripped of its reference to storage and changed to “Utility. Now.” Although Veritas’ core competency and roots have been in storage, the company now has a much broader story to tell. Besides the acquisition of Precise last year, Veritas has also acquired Geodesic and Ejasent in the application management area.

In honor of the release of Version 7 of its APM software, called i3, Jeremy Burton’s keynote featured an Indiana Jones-like adventure (The Utility Jones Trilogy) that touted APM and utility computing in the data center.

Here are some of the highlights of Veritas’ announcements of non-storage products. (I’ll leave the commentary on Veritas’ storage products to my colleague Mike Karp, in his Network World Storage Newsletter.)

I3 Version 7.0, Veritas’ APM product, has been integrated with other Veritas products – namely, Veritas Storage Foundations, Veritas Volume Manager and Veritas Cluster Server. The integrations give i3 deeper management information about the clusters, file systems and storage infrastructure. The GUI is Web-based. Veritas also has a new Business Efficiency Manager that provides a top-down view, from the application to the server. Plus, it has the capability to track resource usage. I3 also allows for unlimited service-level agreement definition for business transactions, and the i3 team has improved and simplified installation and configuration.

Veritas has added CommandCentral Availability to complement its CommandCentral Storage product. CommandCentral does automated discovery and error detection, and is also Veritas’ vehicle for service-level reporting.

Veritas announced the roadmap for Ejasent. The server usage metering technology of MicroMeasure (which can measure the usage of storage, servers and applications by users or departments) will be integrated with CommandCentral. In addition, Upscale fits in with Veritas’ Utility Computing strategy by providing a form of application virtualization, where applications can be moved from and to servers while maintaining state and connections. Veritas claims that it is 50% faster than VMWare. Upscale will be available as an option to Veritas Cluster Server.

Veritas expanded its services organization, adding four new practices in Disaster Recovery, Storage Management, Application Performance Management and Utility Computing. These services will be able to assist customers with methodologies and best practices to assess, design and implement products in each of these four areas.

The evolution to an application mindset is spreading at Veritas – but evolution takes time. With the investment Veritas has made in application management, and the interesting technologies it has acquired, the evolution has to move forward at a good clip. The APM market is continuing to morph and should be an interesting area to keep an eye on in the coming year.