Q&A: CEO Bloom Touts Veritas Utility Computing Strategy

Veritas Software Corp. has been strengthening its utility computing offerings through the acquisitions in the last several months of three software developers: Ejasent Inc., Precise Software Solutions Ltd. and Jareva Technologies. Veritas CEO Gary Bloom believes his company, with its established leadership in storage management and independence from any particular hardware platform, is well-positioned to help customers better exploit their IT resources by centrally managing distributed computing resources. eWEEK Department Editor John S. McCright and Senior Writer Brian Fonseca sat down with Bloom at Veritas headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., recently and discussed the companys present and future.

Veritas has done several acquisitions. Where are you putting in the most time these days?

We have tried not to move away from our strong markets of storage, data recovery and high availability, and use that as a platform to extend into what we think is a pretty practical approach to utility computing.

There are two forms of utility computing that have generally been emerging. One is the completely integrated vertical stack where you buy it all from one vendor. The alternative strategy is one IBM is supporting: Buy portions of the stack and then use services in a big way to integrate them and put them all together. We have a little bit of a contrarian view, which is, "Lets provide the building blocks necessary to enable it and let the customers use as much of what they have today to move in the direction of the layers of utility computing," which is pretty simple: availability, performance and shared infrastructure at a low cost.

Why do you consider storage a key building block to enabling utility computing?

If you look at storage as an industry, its probably one of the few things in an IT shop that is managed today as a utility. In other words, how much of storage is highly distributed anymore around enterprise management? How much of backup-recovery availability of storage is managed in a distributed fashion? Essentially, very little. Its pretty centrally managed, the hardware is commoditized, and customers are now starting to try to get better value out of storage theyve already installed. Its generally pretty available; its recoverable; and its run on a shared, automated infrastructure; so as a building block, its probably the closest thing the industry even has today toward [what] a utilitys going to be in the future, being much more broadly deployed.