INTERVIEW 18 01732 759725 Veritas Technologies has been active in the data management space for 40 years, operating very much as a channel-first business – around 95% of its business goes through the channel, even more in EMEA and India – with a strong focus on its NetBackup family of enterprise backup and recovery solutions. As part of its vision to become the number one data management company for multi-cloud, it has updated its product offering over the last two years, launching a cloud data management platform, Alta, in October 2022 and in October 2023 introducing 360 Defense, a comprehensive blueprint for data protection, cyber resiliency and restore. The former expands its offering with cloud-native capabilities, helping Veritas punch into the cloud market; the latter provides an ecosystem of certified partner solutions from the likes of Microsoft, CrowdStrike, CyberArk, Qualys, Semperis and Symantec by Broadcom. “We’ve got a REDLab environment where we can put our products and those of our partners and let loose all the horrible viruses and malware out there to test those products and our interoperability with them,” explains Norman. He adds that the idea is to position Veritas as much more of a turnkey solution, incorporating a wider ecosystem benefitting customers’ cyber resiliency. “The challenge that our customers have is that if you’ve got multiple products that aren’t necessarily integrated or interoperable it increases the attack surface through which cyber criminals can access customers’ data and business operations. By making sure everything’s more integrated, we help customers derive greater value from our solutions.” Key differentiators This builds on the capabilities that Veritas has developed over the last 40 years across the whole data management spectrum. “To give you a couple of examples: with our governance and recovery solutions we enable customers to protect their data and maintain immutable data that they lock away. An analogy might be having a safe in your house for watches or jewellery so that if someone comes into the house your high value possessions will be secure. The trouble is you’re not going to be able to wear that watch or piece of jewellery if it’s impossible to reach. Our differentiator is that we provide solutions that are safe and air-gapped so people can’t get to the data, but which are also accessible so you are able to restore and start your business up again if necessary. “It takes 73 days for a typical organisation to understand they’ve been attacked and then do something about it. So, for business continuity, having these capabilities and being able to restore, protect and govern data is vitally important.” Another differentiator, Norman suggests, is Veritas’ ability to scale-up in a cost-effective way at a time when organisations are generating, and being required to store and protect, ever greater volumes of data. He adds that the combination of rising data volumes and Veritas’ new capabilities is driving demand for Alta and the company’s core NetBackup and hardware appliances portfolios. “With everything I’ve just talked about around cyber resiliency, having integrated solutions and having that scale, combining our software in a turnkey appliance is very attractive in terms of its performance, its scale, price points and all those sorts of things.” Big growth drivers include governance and compliance, for example the need to record, store and potentially access, phone calls, mobile calls, video calls and chat, especially in financial services, and data analysis, whether it be to identify and flag up unusual behaviour for compliance purposes or to gain competitive advantage through better insights and decision-making. “Our success goes back to that analogy of the safe. It’s about having immutable data management for storage and having the ability to restore data At the time of our meeting, Norman was VP of Channel & Alliances, EMEAI. Since then, following significant growth in partner revenues and market expansion, he has been promoted to Regional Vice President for UK & Ireland and DACH, with responsibility for all elements of the UKI and DACH regional sales teams. He takes on this new role at an interesting time for Veritas which on February 8 announced that Cohesity, a leader in AI-powered data security and management, intends to combine with Veritas’ data protection business, which will be carved out of Veritas, marrying Cohesity’s speed and innovation with Veritas’ scale, global presence and installed base to create a $1.6 billion turnover business with 10,000 customers and a 3,000-strong global partner network. The combined company will continue to develop all Cohesity products and services plus the Veritas NetBackup, NetBackup appliances and Alta data protection platform, while working towards the delivery of an integrated solution combining the best technology from both companies. The remaining assets of Veritas, including its InfoScale, Data Compliance and Backup Exec businesses, will be incorporated into a separate company, DataCo. This is clearly a momentous change for Veritas and Cohesity that has the potential to help customers of both organisations address the data management challenges highlighted by Norman in his conversation with Technology Reseller, such as ensuring cyber resilience, taking back control of cloud environments and gaining impactful insights from data. Ths piece was written before the announcement of the merger with Cohesity and the formation of DataCo, but the points raised by Norman, and the opportunities for channel partners of both new entities still apply. The players may be different, but the song remains the same. At the end of January, Technology Reseller caught up with Oliver Norman to discuss his first 10 months at secure multi-cloud data management leader Veritas Technologies. Striking the right balance
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDUxNDM=