Now that Veritas Technologies, which officially spun out of Symantec this week to become an independent entity, is making it clear that it is looking to the channel to help drive the adoption of new classes of information management services.
Rather than thinking in terms of simply managing storage, the opportunity before Veritas and its channel partners is to help customers craft information management strategies on a much larger scale, said Matt Cain, chief product officer for Veritas. Not only is data in the age of the cloud more distributed than ever, there are more types of data than ever.
Customers are looking to Veritas not only to manage that data more efficiently, but to help correlate in a way that leverages analytics to bring up more actionable business insights, Cain said. So many organizations are starting to appoint chief data officers that have specific mandates to bring order to data management chaos, he added.
To accomplish that goal, Veritas will work with its partners to create platforms to deliver those services. In some instances, a partner may opt to build a service on its own that Veritas will help bring to market, Cain said. In others, Veritas will take advantage of the economics of the cloud to create services that partners can resell.
In the latter instance, the partner becomes a managed service provider (MSP) spared the capital cost of building and maintaining that service. Veritas, for example, has already crafted a Veritas Resiliency Platform, available now, that provides a business continuity service around its backup and recovery software that makes use of a combination of local and cloud instances of its data protection software.
The company is also addressing data management issues via Veritas InfoScale, a software-defined approach to managing storage and application availability, and through Veritas Information Map, a cloud application that makes use of data stored in NetBackup to provide visibility into where and how unstructured data is stored across the enterprise.
In all those instances, Cain said that in this day and age, a more modern approach to managing information is clearly required. Obviously, Veritas is not the only vendor with simpler information management ambitions. But if information management by definition requires a heterogeneous approach to data and storage management, then Cain said he likes Veritas’ odds.
Clearly, Veritas’ strengths as an information management platform have long been overshadowed by the focus that Symantec had on IT security. What remains to be seen now is how well Veritas can rally channel partners to that cause.
Michael Vizard has been covering IT issues in the enterprise for more than 25 years as an editor and columnist for publications such as InfoWorld, eWEEK, Baseline, CRN, ComputerWorld and Digital Review.