When it was bought years ago by security firm Symantec, Veritas was already a big name in the field of backup and disaster recovery. But the buyout led to Veritas somehow losing its way, overshadowed by Symantec’s emphasis on security.
But now that it is back as a standalone software company, Veritas said it is ready to reclaim and fortify its old hunting grounds in the data space — but with the cloud as a major focus area.
At its recent “Veritas Vision Executive Forum” conference held in Bali, Indonesia, Veritas executive vice president for enterprise data protection and compliance Deepak Mohan recalled that the company’s time with Symantec was not exactly bad as the mothership was producing “very good technologies”.
“We were producing some of the best and latest stuff. But we were not the best in terms of telling the world about data protection because we were the under the umbrella of a security company. The corporate messaging was all around security. Data protection and recovery was just an afterthought,” Mohan told journalists from Southeast Asia.
“But in the last 12 months, Veritas has significantly focused as a company on the data services platform. Veritas has gotten its groove back,” enthused Mohan, who is based in the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters in Santa Clara, California.
With data privacy and cloud computing both dramatically transforming the technology landscape, the executive said Veritas is in the perfect position to seize opportunities in what it called data API (availability, protection, and insights).
“The services that people expect on-premise for enterprise IT, they also need them in the cloud. And our software platform allows you to have that. We have our focus back on enterprise data services. So I think that’s really exciting,” said Mohan.
At the tech conference in Bali, other top officials stressed that Veritas has the pedigree and capability in data-intensive areas as the company is currently ranked no. 1 in backup, recovery, and archiving.
“How do you protect your data, make it available, and drive the insights that lead to success? Well, you have us to depend on for that. We also have the cloud platform,” said Chris Lin, senior vice president for sales in Asia Pacific and Japan at Veritas.
According to Lin, the various factors that are driving the digital transformation of many businesses have also resulted in complexity because of the mix of traditional and virtual environments, as well as new workloads and multi-cloud setup.
“Do you create a siloed approach to manage all of these or would you like a unified way? Our message is that there is a way in which you can optimize or simplify this environment,” he said.
Lin said data protection is vital area that enterprises should invest on considering the prevalence of security threats such as ransomware. In fact, he noted that 50 percent of all victims of ransomware were unable to retrieve access to their data even after paying the ransom.
“You must have control of your data. If you get victimized, you should make sure you are able to recover from ransomware fast,” the executive said.
This is the reason, the company said, why Veritas is also offering hardware appliance to go with its data protection offering, although it emphasized the Veritas remains to be a software firm.
“Just to be very clear, we’re actually a solutions company. The appliance piece is to address data protection. Why do you backup? It is to recover, right? But the reality in today’s world is that you just don’t backup and recover, you need to recover fast. When you need to recover fast, you do need to backup in a purpose-built backup appliance that enables fast recovery,” said Ravi Rajendran, vice president and managing director for the Asia South region at Veritas.
“We are still a very hardware-agnostic. The appliance has actually been there for years, it’s not new. And a lot of our customers are backing up using that backup appliance purely for recovery standpoint,” he added.
Rajendran said Veritas is looking at the Philippines as a major growth area as it has one of the highest GDP (gross dometic product) in the countries in the region alongside Indonesia.
“In the Philippines, there is a good percentage of companies that does not have a disaster recovery strategy. That was a big surprise to me knowing that Philippine is sitting in an area where there is a lot of natural disasters like typhoons,” he said.
“But there are many of them now that are rethinking their strategy. So, I think we are in a good position to play in the Philippines. I believe that our business will grow even faster in Philippines.”
