Sitting down with CBR’s Joao Lima, Veritas’ Matt Ellard and Ian Wood spoke about how the fresh split from Symantec will create a billion dollar business opportunity for the company.
In October 2014, Symantec announced Veritas would be pursuing a solo route. In April, the companies’ salesforces platforms were separated and in October, Veritas will be operationally independent ahead of the final goodbye in January 2016.
Ellard said: "It is key for people to understand that this is not a change in strategy or direction for Veritas or Symantec.
"It is the best way we feel we can execute against the unified strategy that we have had for Symantec for a numbers of years, and then the kind of all information management on the Veritas side.
"We felt the only way to execute with a portfolio go-to-market resources, was to separate the two companies."
Veritas trades with 86% of the world’s biggest companies and it is estimated to be a $2.7 billion company, according to the SVP.
Looking into the future, the company is eyeing, as a standalone body, an opportunity to market of "around $25 billion".
"We are addressing our total market opportunity of $18.6 billion. We [also] think there is an adjacent market opportunity of $6.8 billion or so."
Wood said: "Data protection, backup, high availability and recovery in data centres is the market where we make sure there are critical applications available and then as we move into information governance, that is really about providing insights and allowing customers to manage the information effectively. These are the markets that make up the $18.6 billion.
"We see a change on things like information intelligence and information governance around the new trends, like General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR)."
Wood explained that historically, this is a different way customers manage their information and that is fuelling that information governance market to growth.
He added: "The other area is around availability of applications. Where that is moving is what we call disaster recovery or Recovery as a Service (RaaS), and again that is an adjacent market.
"Customers no longer look at making their information available in the data centre as they are embracing hybrid clouds. These are the adjacent markets we are looking into with our roadmap."
C-suite fears
The aforementioned roadmap will be fed with Veritas desire to explore key issues affecting the C-suite that spends money on IT infrastructure but does not see the full benefits, according to Ellard.
He said: "One of the problems is the explosion of data, and that is not going to slow down with the IoT.
"What people need to understand is how to get better clarity and insight into their information. What is the critical information they really need to manage and what is the information they can delete.
"IoT will only increase this issue. Not all data is equal. Although data is growing, the rich content of data companies need is probably not growing as much. There is a lot of duplicated data, with no legal relevance or competitive advantage, that just resides around the organisation and they spend a fortune on it."
The SVP added that Veritas wants to help enterprises by giving them a better insight and help with the management of their data in order to delete extra data, reducing costs and complexity.
He said: "[We want to] Give them [customers] better insight into the real crown jewels of their information. Therefore, they can market and keep their business running more effectively.
"Secondly, once we categorised that information, we need to make sure they can get that data whenever and wherever possible, making sure that the infrastructure and the key information is highly available."
New family of products
To make sure that information is available, the company launched on July 7 a family of products to tackle the issues raised above.
The main product is the Veritas NetBackup 7.7, which is an enterprise-grade backup solution that introduces enhanced data centre integration for VMware vSphere 6 and Microsoft Hyper-V, as well as support for hybrid-cloud deployments leveraging Amazon Web Services, Google Nearline and others.
Wood said: "We come from a very strong data centre pedigree. In terms of looking at the Veritas’ portfolio we look at providing availability. We see a shift in where the data centre is.
"The data centre itself is no longer bricks and mortar; it now has to be responsible for information that may reside in the cloud.
"Our view is to manage the information where it is stored."
The EMEA strategist also introduced the Veritas Information Map, which gleans metadata from Veritas NetBackup, stores it in the cloud and presents the data in a visual navigation tool that helps identify areas of risk, areas of value and areas of waste across a customer’s primary content repositories.
"Our prediction is that the IoT is going to increase unstructured data. When we speak to customers, data growth is more of a topic than ever before.
"The Information Map lets us take information about the information and quickly allows to get a visualisation [in a visual navigation tool] of the information. The customer can then identify what is critical and what is not critical."
Ellard said: "We cannot just keep managing the data the way we have been and we cannot keep on bulking infrastructure as we have been in the last 20 years. Companies need to understand what is important.
"Moving from infrastructure to information management is where we are seeing the biggest shift. That is exactly where CEOs and CIOs need to go because they cannot just keep up with the costs."
