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Following an often-contentious 10-year business relationship, Veritas Technologies on Feb. 1 officially declared its independence from Symantec and began operations as a newly independent, privately owned company.
The legal separation day was actually Jan. 29, the last business day of the month. The company, most well-known for its NetBackup data backup software, is counting Feb. 1 as its first day of business as a private entity.
Symantec, one of the world’s largest data protection providers, bought Veritas in 2005 and then sold it last Aug. 11 to private equity firm Carlyle Group of Washington, D.C., and its Singaporean partner, GIC, for $8 billion in cash.
In what may be the start of a trend, the move follows by a week the split of Xerox into two business entities and by a few months the similar division of Hewlett-Packard Co. into separate companies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and HP Inc.
Veritas, co-founded by Stanford University professor and investor Mark Leslie in the early 1990s, is a longtime supplier of large storage and data backup systems to Fortune 500 companies and others.
Chief Product Officer Matt Cain told eWEEK that Veritas, which now positions itself as an information management business that includes both storage and backup, has particularly loyal customers.
“Not only do we serve 86 percent of the Fortune 500, but our 10 largest customers each have been with us for more than 10 years,” Cain said. “That says a lot in the current IT environment.”
Veritas employs 7,800 full-time workers in 58 countries.
New CEO Bill Coleman and his management team will continue to be focused on helping clients draw improved value from their business information, a common problem in enterprise business, Cain said.
If you think Coleman’s name is familiar, well, it probably is. Coleman has a long history of starting technology companies, including Cassatt Inc. and BEA Systems, where he was CEO. While on Coleman’s watch, BEA Systems—which Oracle eventually acquired—became the fastest software company to reach $1 billion in revenue.
Cain said the Mountain View, Calif.-based company will officially announce its entire board of directors in several days, and it would be a major surprise if Leslie was not included. However, it is known that the new board chairman will be Bill Krause, former president and CEO of 3Com, and that David Scott, former chairman and CEO of 3PAR—who was until recently senior vice president and general manager of HPE’s global storage business—will be a member.
Veritas plays in market segments that in aggregate will be worth $24 billion by 2018, according to IDC and Gartner researchers. These markets include backup and recovery, integrated appliances, information availability and archiving solutions, where Veritas holds No. 1 or No. 2 market-share positions, Cain said.
Veritas has scheduled a global Webcast on trends in data protection for Feb. 11 at 8 a.m. PT/11 a.m. ET with author and original contributor to “The Data Deluge” Kenneth Cukier. You can register here.