Veritas Software Corp. - Data Management Software -  Category Directory

(650) 527-8000 

350 Ellis Street
Mountain View, CA 94043

www.veritas.com
 

Sales

$1.7 billion

Business Description  

VERITAS Software Corporation is a leading independent supplier of storage and infrastructure software products and services. Our software products operate across a variety of computing environments, from personal computers, or PCs, and workgroup servers to enterprise servers and networking platforms in corporate data centers to protect, archive and recover business-critical data, provide high levels of application availability, enhance and tune system and application performance and enable recovery from disasters. Our solutions enable businesses to reduce costs by efficiently and effectively managing their information technology, or IT, infrastructure as they seek to maximize value from their IT investments. We offer software products focused on three areas:

• Data Protection: products for ensuring the protection, retention and recovery of data using both disk and tape media.

• Storage Management: products for optimizing storage hardware utilization, simplifying administration for environments with diverse computer hardware and software architectures and enabling high performance and continuous availability of mission-critical applications.

• Utility Computing Infrastructure: products for managing IT service levels for high availability, high performance and process automation.

We develop and sell software products for the most widely-used operating systems, including various versions of Windows, UNIX and Linux. We also develop and sell software products that support a wide variety of servers, storage devices, databases, applications and network equipment. Our customers include many leading global corporations and small and medium-sized enterprises located around the world and operating in a wide variety of industries. In addition to our software products, we also provide a full range of services to assist customers in assessing, architecting, implementing, supporting and maintaining their storage and infrastructure software solutions.
Our product strategy is to meet the data storage, system availability and performance needs of our customers, while remaining at the forefront of innovation to support our customers’ long-term requirements by providing the building blocks for utility computing. Utility computing is a computing model that delivers IT as a measurable service, aligned with business needs and capable of adapting to changing demands. We offer a building block approach that allows our customers to evolve to a utility computing model in an evolutionary and modular fashion while leveraging their existing IT investments.

In 2003, we completed the acquisitions of Precise Software Solutions Ltd. and Jareva Technologies, Inc. These strategic acquisitions provided us with essential components for utility computing, including software that monitors, analyzes and improves the performance of application infrastructure, and automated server provisioning technology that allows businesses to automatically deploy additional servers without manual intervention. In January 2004, we acquired Ejasent, Inc. to add important application migration technology, which allows IT personnel to move an application from one server to another without disrupting or terminating the application, to our growing utility computing portfolio.

With revenue of $1.75 billion in 2003, VERITAS ranks among the top 10 software companies in the world and, as of December 31, 2003, had 6,518 employees in 39 countries. We were incorporated in Delaware in October 1998. Our predecessor company was originally incorporated in California in 1982 and reincorporated in Delaware in 1997. Our principal offices are located at 350 Ellis Street, Mountain View, California 94043, and our telephone number at that location is (650) 527-8000. Our home page on the Internet is at http://www.veritas.com.

Products

VERITAS offers a wide range of leading software products that are broadly categorized into data protection, storage management and utility computing infrastructure solutions. Demand for our software products and services is driven by the ever increasing quantity of data being collected and the need for data to be protected and accessible at all times, particularly in the event of a disaster. Other factors driving demand include the rapid increase in the number of Internet users and companies doing business online, the continuous automation of business processes, increased pressures on companies to lower storage and server management costs and increase the utilization and performance of existing heterogeneous IT assets and the increasing scrutiny on document retention and regulatory compliance. Our products offer our customers scalability for managing the rapid growth of data and the increasing complexity and size of IT environments.

Data Protection

We offer software products designed to protect, back up, archive and restore data across a broad range of computing environments from large corporate data centers to remote groups and PC clients, such as desktop and laptop computers. Our data protection products protect and recover data on servers and for clients running most major operating systems and databases. These products integrate to provide solutions to manage data throughout its lifecycle — from creation to disposal, both onsite and offsite, across all levels of the storage hierarchy — including disk, tape and optical storage media. Our data protection products include:

 Storage Management

We offer products for optimizing storage resource utilization, simplifying administration of heterogeneous environments and providing continuous availability of mission-critical applications and data. These products are designed for most UNIX, Linux and Windows servers, and include replication and a storage resource management suite. They are offered in both standalone and application solutions, as agents and options, and are often combined with our utility computing infrastructure and data protection products to deliver high levels of availability and performance. Our storage management products include:

 

Utility Computing Infrastructure

Our utility computing infrastructure products include tools for managing application availability and performance service level agreements, maximizing server and storage utilization and automating IT processes for enterprise data centers. These products include clustering/ high availability, application performance management and centralized service level management functionality. These products also include capabilities to measure and report costs incurred and standardized Web-based interfaces that reduce administrative costs. Our utility computing infrastructure products include:

Services

We provide a full range of services to assist our customers in assessing, architecting, implementing, supporting and maintaining their storage and infrastructure software solutions. Our global services organization provides customers with maintenance and technical support, consulting and education services.

Maintenance and Technical Support

We believe that providing a high level of customer service and technical support is critical to customer satisfaction and our success in increasing the adoption rate of our solutions. Most of our customers have maintenance and technical support agreements with us that provide for fixed fee, renewable annual maintenance and technical support, consisting of technical and emergency support, bug fixes and product upgrades. Our customers can choose from a variety of support packages to address their specific needs, ranging from one-time incident charges to comprehensive support services with a dedicated single point of contact at VERITAS. We offer seven-day a week, 24-hour a day telephone support, as well as e-mail customer support. In addition, through our “Business Critical” service, we provide our enterprise customers with support account management, emergency fly-to-site capability and specialized reporting. Some of the value-added resellers, system integrators and original equipment manufacturers that offer our products also provide customer technical support for our products through a frontline/backline arrangement whereby the partner handles the initial customer contact, the frontline, and we provide secondary support and engineering assistance, the backline.

Consulting

We offer our customers a full suite of consulting services, ranging from basic product selection and implementation engagements to more complex strategic and analytical services like business continuity readiness assessments and disaster recovery planning. These services help our customers plan for the management and control of enterprise computing in their specific computing environments, including storage area network environments.

Education Services

We have a worldwide customer education organization that offers structured training to our customers. The focus of this organization is aligned with our strategy to offer end-to-end software solutions by providing instruction from highly experienced education professionals either at the customer location or in one of our multi-platform classrooms. The training helps our customers optimize their investments in technology and technical personnel through access to high quality, comprehensive instruction.

Marketing, Sales and Distribution

We sell and market our products and related services both directly to end-users and through a variety of indirect sales channels, which include value-added resellers, or VARs, distributors, systems integrators, or SIs, and original equipment manufacturers, or OEMs. Our customers include many leading global corporations and small and medium-sized enterprises around the world operating in a wide variety of industries.

Direct Sales to End-Users, and VARs. One of our primary methods of distribution to end-users is through our direct sales, services and technical support organizations that market our products and services throughout the world. Many of our products involve a consultative, solution-oriented sales model that uses the collaboration of technical and sales personnel to propose solutions to specific customer requirements, often in conjunction with hardware, software and managed services providers. We focus our initial sales efforts on senior executives and IT department personnel who are responsible for a customer’s business initiatives and data center management. We complement our direct sales efforts with indirect sales channels such as resellers, VARs, distributors and SIs. Single and multiple tier distribution channels are important in our global expansion strategy and are the primary channels for addressing the small to medium-sized enterprise market. We will continue to invest in programs that train and enable our channel partners to market our technologies and utility computing capabilities. We provide our software products to our channel partners and customers under non-exclusive license agreements, including shrink-wrap or click-wrap licenses for some products, without transferring title of our software products.

Other Indirect Channels. An important element of our sales and marketing strategy is to continue to expand our relationships with third parties, including our strategic partners, to increase market awareness, demand and acceptance of our products. Our strategic partners generate and qualify sales leads, recommend our solutions which interoperate with their products or are related to their value-added services, bring us into opportunities and complete transactions through distribution rights granted by us. We may enter into distribution arrangements for our products with our strategic partners, including granting rights to integrate or bundle our products with the partner’s products and services. Some of our strategic partner relationships include:

• Independent Software Vendors: We collaborate with and license our software to independent software vendors, or ISVs, including enterprise application software, database, infrastructure and other packaged application software vendors. Some of our significant ISV partners include Amdocs, BEA Systems, Inc., Novell, Oracle, SAP and Sybase, Inc. Application vendors can exert significant influence on our joint customers’ buying decisions, so we will continue to develop strong, market-oriented relationships with certain ISVs, including joining and investing in their partner programs and demonstrating customer value for our joint solutions. We build, maintain and promote certain application program interfaces within our products that allow interoperability between our products and the ISVs’ products. We also market ISV agents, options and extensions that are specifically built to allow interoperability with or optimal performance of our products and ISV products. ISVs may incorporate our product into their product, bundle our products with their products, serve as authorized resellers of our products or use VERITAS with their own products to provide hosted services. Under these arrangements, ISVs are not obligated to sell our products or services.

• System Integrators and Managed Services Providers: We collaborate with system integrators, or SIs, who may refer their customers to us, utilize us as a subcontractor in some situations, build standard and customized solutions with our products or use our products to deliver hosted services as well as outsourced services. SIs use our products and services in conjunction with optimizing their client’s investment in high-end transactional applications and related hardware. Some of our SI relationships include IBM Global Services, Accenture Ltd, Electronic Data Systems Corporation, Computer Sciences Corporation, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young Group and BearingPoint, Inc. Some SIs are authorized resellers of our products and some use our products and services to deliver consultative services or managed services. Under these arrangements, SIs and managed services providers are not obligated to use or sell our products or services.

In general, we receive a fee for each sublicense of our products granted by our partners. In some cases, we grant rights to distribute promotional versions of our products, which have limited functionality or limited use periods, on a non-fee basis. We enter into both object-code only and, when appropriate, source-code licenses of our products. We do not transfer title of our software products to our customers.

Original Equipment Manufacturers. Another important element of our sales and marketing strategy involves our strategic relationships with OEM partners. These OEM partners may incorporate our product into their products, bundle our products with their products, endorse our products in the marketplace or serve as authorized resellers of our products. Our OEM partners with whom we generate the greatest distribution and sales of our products include Dell Products L.P., Hewlett-Packard Company, International Business Machines Corporation (or IBM), Microsoft Corporation and Sun Microsystems, Inc. In addition, we have recently entered into strategic relationship with other OEMs, including Cisco Systems, Inc., Fujitsu Ltd., Hitachi Ltd., Intel Corporation, Network Appliance, Inc. and Unisys Corporation. In order to reach new markets and extend the value of our OEM partners, some of our partners may have additional rights to our products and services. These include using VERITAS in a hosted services environment, integrating our support services with their own support services, thereby providing combined services to our joint customers; or reselling our packaged as well as our custom consulting services. These licensing and services rights allow our partners’ customers to maximize their system availability, performance and utilization through optimal configurations and reliable installations. In general, our OEM partners are not obligated to sell our products or services under these arrangements and are not obligated to continue to include our products in future versions of their products.
Other Important Relationships. In addition to the channels of distribution and strategic relationships described above, we also maintain important relationships with various technology partners. Over 100 established and emerging companies, specializing in storage management, data protection or utility computing infrastructure, participate in our technology partner program and interoperability lab services, some gaining access to software development kits, special purpose testing programs and protocols, as well as development support services. By providing configuration guidance to the market, we help reduce customer’s implementation time and the total cost of ownership of our products. We support a large and diverse number of hardware and software technology vendors, and, as a leader in storage and infrastructure software, we make significant contributions to industry standards and support them through our technology partner program, an approach consistent with our core strength in heterogeneous, open computing. Some technology partners integrate and distribute our products under licensing arrangements as bundled solutions for vertical markets such as telecommunications, finance and healthcare. Under these arrangements, technology partners are not obligated to sell our products.

Customers

Our software solutions are used by customers in a wide variety of industries, including many leading global corporations and small and medium-sized enterprises around the world, as well as by various governmental entities. In 2003, 2002 and 2001, no end-user customer accounted for more than 10% of our net revenue. In 2003 and 2001, no distributor accounted for more than 10% of our net revenue. In 2002, a distributor that sells our products and services through resellers accounted for approximately 11% of our net revenue.

Competition

The principal markets in which we compete are data protection, file system and volume management, clustering, replication, storage resource management, storage area network management, automated server provisioning, application performance management and centralized service level management. These markets are intensely competitive and rapidly changing. Our future anticipated growth and success will depend on our ability to develop superior products more rapidly and less expensively than our competitors, to educate potential customers as to the benefits of licensing our products rather than relying on alternative products and technologies and to develop additional channels to market.

Many of our strategic partners, including EMC Corporation, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle Corporation and Sun Microsystems, offer software products that compete with our products or have announced their intention to focus on developing or acquiring their own storage and enterprise management software products. While we may compete with these companies for a share of the market, some also resell our products, and in some cases incorporate our technology into their products or solutions. We also may be involved with them in collaborative efforts to address interoperability issues and to set standards for evolving technology.

In addition, we compete with hardware and software vendors that offer data protection products, file system and volume management products, clustering and replication products, storage area networking management solutions, automated server provisioning solutions and centralized service level management products. We compete with software vendors that offer application performance management solutions and systems management companies that are integrating storage resource management functions into their platforms. Some of our products also compete with enterprise management vendors, including BMC Software, Inc., Computer Associates International, Inc., Mercury Interactive Corporation and Quest Software, Inc.

The principal competitive factors in our industry include product functionality, product integration, platform coverage, price, ability to scale, worldwide sales and marketing infrastructure and global technical support. Although some of our competitors have greater financial, technical, sales, marketing and other resources than we do, as well as greater name recognition and a larger installed customer base, we believe we compete favorably on the basis of each of these competitive factors relative to our competitors. We believe that our unique position as an independent software provider, strategy for utility computing infrastructure, hardware independent solutions and proven data protection and storage software market leadership, give us an advantaged position in the market.
 

Our future anticipated growth and success will depend on our ability to continue to develop products more rapidly than and superior to those of our competitors, educate potential customers as to the benefits of licensing our products rather than purchasing or using competing technologies and develop additional channels to market. Our future and existing competitors could introduce products with superior features, scalability and functionality at lower prices than our products, and could also bundle existing or new products with other more established products to compete with our products. Our competitors could also gain market share by acquiring or forming strategic alliances with our other competitors. Finally, because new distribution methods offered by the Internet and electronic commerce have removed many of the barriers to entry historically faced by start-up companies in the software industry, we may face additional competition from these companies in the future. Increased competition may result in price reductions, reduced gross margins and loss of market share, any of which could adversely affect our business and operating results.
 

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VRTS

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