Veritas Software has upgraded its flagship data backup
technology and has embarked on an acquisition-fuelled strategy to
expand into other IT management technologies.
The plan to augment products such as its NetBackup software with
server and application management tools to help Veritas compete
against more diversified rivals such as EMC, Computer Associates
and IBM.
Veritas officials said their goals are to offer IT
administrators a bundled suite of management tools and increase the
company's annual revenue from $1.5bn (£950,000) to $5bn
(£3.2bn) over the next three years.
Tom Guthrie, vice-president of technology operations at Cox
Communications said the move by Veritas has definite value.
"With all of our suppliers, we've encouraged them to go up the
value chain in areas they're good at, and we're happy to interact
with them about that," Guthrie said.
Guthrie recently standardised backup operations on Cox's 10TByte
storage-area network (San) by installing NetBackup.
Veritas has announced three acquisitions since November, adding
products in areas such as server provisioning and application
performance management.
Bill Augustadt, chief technology officer at BlueStar, said the
ability to pool server capacity to address application needs and
then monitor performance on the fly should help the application
outsourcing firm control its services more efficiently according to
customer needs.
"Any automation we can do will allow us to scale across
platforms with fewer people to manage them," said Augustadt, who
uses various Veritas products to handle data backups on a 160TByte
San.
Anders Lofgren, an analyst at Giga Information Group, predicted
that other storage software suppliers will adopt similar expansion
plans. But, he added, "for Veritas to build credibility outside of
the storage management space - that will take some time."
NetBackup 4.5 includes a feature called Instant Data Recovery,
which lets users recover data directly from disk drives instead of
from tape devices, Veritas said. The upgrade also streamlines the
process of storing Microsoft Exchange e-mail attachments.