The boisterous niche of enterprise storage management got another jolt forward on Tuesday, with Veritas Software Corp. officials announcing that IBMs Global Services division is now a reseller of their entire product line.
The deal will give Veritas customers consulting, implementation, support and maintenance from IBM.
The deal, already underway, is just one part of Veritas plan to expand globally, said Don Foster, vice president of partner sales at the Mountain View, Calif., firm. He refused to elaborate on the rest of the expansion plans.
For the near-term, the deal is meant to “jointly deliver enterprise-class storage management solutions. Its a relatively new relationship,” Foster said. “We basically approached each other. We were looking for an alliance to bring together our data software applications with a trusted adviser in consulting and infrastructure management.”
Meanwhile, IBM plans to use Veritas customer base to extend its global services sales, in “everything from the networking and base infrastructure all the way up to the application space,” said Don Bradford, general manager of storage services for the Armonk, N.Y., companys Global Services division. IBM can also exploit Veritas expertise in numerous operating systems and storage platforms, he said.
Besides the United States, the deal immediately applies to Canada and Latin America, and will apply to Europe and the Far East in the near future, officials said. The worldwide storage management software market could be as large as $10.7 billion by 2005, according to International Data Corp., in Framingham, Mass.