Veritas Moves up the Stack

Veritas Software Corp. (Nasdaq: VRTS) has been testing the water on the server side of the data center and is getting ready to dive in. At its annual user conference in Las Vegas today, the company is announcing plans to provide software that provisions and manages, not only storage, but servers.

The new "utility computing" push combines Veritas's existing storage software technology with that of two recent acquisitions -- Precise Software Solutions Inc. (Nasdaq: PRSE) and Jareva Technologies Inc. -- to help simplify management of servers, the company says. While Veritas has hinted at its intentions to move away from being a pure storage software play for a while, this is the first explicit roadmap for how it intends to move up the stack (see Veritas Gets Precise and Veritas to Acquire Precise, Jareva).

"They've been creeping out," says IDC analyst Bill North. "Even the guys who are one taco away from a combination meal should have figured it out."

With software from Precise, Veritas claims it can detect performance problems in the entire IT stack from applications all the way down to storage. The software technology sees the problem, identifies its root cause, and suggests a solution before end users have even noticed a slowdown, the company claims.

"Whatever Precise was doing, Veritas has the opportunity to do it bigger," North says. "Precise's old competitors should be looking at Veritas as a significantly larger gorilla... You've got to know they're going to be selling this stuff hard."The acquisition of Jareva, meanwhile, brought Veritas automated server provisioning software technology. Along with its existing Veritas Cluster Server, the new Volume Manager and OpForce enable customers to share storage and server resources. This, Veritas says, ensures the ongoing availability of data applications and servers across complex, heterogeneous environments at the same time as it drives up utilization rates and lowers hardware costs.

"We'll make sure applications run, no matter what happens," says Jeremy Burton, chief marketing officer at Veritas. "We're doing the same thing for servers as we've done for storage."

By integrating the Precise and Jareva technologies with its products, Veritas says it allows for fully automated systems. When Precise's software detects performance problems, it notifies Jareva's technology that a new Web server machine, for instance, is required to fix the problem. Jareva automatically provisions the machine, and then hands it over to Veritas's Cluster Server to manage. This solves problems without requiring any administrator intervention, according to Veritas.

The new server products are all currently in beta, and Veritas expects to ship them in the second half of the year. The Jareva technology is the closest to completion, according to Burton, who says those products, which now have about 30 beta customers, will be ready to ship "in a matter of weeks."

The question, of course, is how successful Veritas will be in tapping this new market. For starters, the company will have to go head to head with a long line of formidable competitors that have a much longer heritage in offering top-to-bottom solutions, like Computer Associates International (NYSE: CA), Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ), IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), and Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW)."It's not where their sweet spot has been," North points out. "They're competing against different types of companies." And while Veritas's lack of a hardware agenda and emphasis on supporting heterogeneous environments gives it an edge on the storage side, the same may not be true at the application layer. "The heterogeneous message has had some legs in storage, but it's less proven on the server side," he says. "The jury's still out there."

One beta customer, at least, says he's impressed with Veritas's new server software. Richard Guetzloff, the senior director of enterprise operations at printing company RR Donnelley