Veritas puts its force behind utility computing

Utility computing is the way to go, and this is precisely why Veritas'
annual conference 'Vision 2004' held in Mumbai, focused on this subject as
its theme. The company provides the software building blocks for utility
computing, which enables increased availability of data that is stored as
backup, increases performance, reduces complexity by consolidating storage and
server resources. It also delivers information and computing services
efficiently and cost-effectively.

Talking more of the services of utility computing, Mark Bregman, CTO and
Acting Manager, Application and Service Management Group, Veritas Software said,
"Our aim is to give heterogeneous software for utility computing, and be
platform independent". "We want to provide flexibility to the
customers when they move to a new vendor, or shift to a new Operating System
like Solaris, or move to a new paradigm," he added.

Some of the key aspects touched upon in the conference were achieving
business efficiency, through infrastructure migration and consolidation,
architecting solutions for disaster recovery, next generation clustering amongst
a range of other topics.

Veritas plans to expand its R&D center in India by adding new facilities
and increasing its headcount by 50%. It had invested $50 million last year to
technically establish its foothold in India.

As for their marketing strategy, Robin Purohit, VP, Marketing and Product
Strategy, Veritas said, "We have a channel based strategy to go to the
market. The vendors would need training to go to the customers". He also
added that the telecom vertical in India is targeted the most. Veritas has a
slightly different model in mind for call centers, which are coming up at a very
fast rate. Robin is quite optimistic about the Indian market. "Recovery of
data from disasters is very important. With a lot of multinationals and other
new companies coming to India, certain building blocks like storage, backup, and
utility are the first steps to build any new organization," he remarked. He
also said that if they give consistent results to their customers, and are vocal
about the services they provide, they would be a stiff competitor to other
software companies".

Robin Purohit, VP, Market and Product Strategy, Veritas expounds on the software building blocks for utility computing Mark Bergman, CTO and Acting Manager of Veritas (extreme right) conducts the executive forum, answering questions topmost on CTOs' mind Ajay Verma, Country Channels Manager, Veritas India (center) hands over a gift to a winner at the event

Various stalls were put up by companies like HP, Sun Microsystems, BEA, Dell,
Quantum, and Veritas too, to display various products and also show the storage
capacity of HDDs, laptops, etc. Most of the sessions at the event were around
the subject of utility computing.

To make the presentations more lively, a visual skit 'The Utility Jones
Trilogy' was shown, taking cue from the movie Indiana Jones. The first part
focused mainly on command central availability, wherein application clusters
could be visualized at a glance. The second part dealt with the software to
detect and correct application performance degradation before it affects the end
user experience. The final part of the trilogy talked of utility computing
promising to give better application service levels and that too at lower costs.

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BENEFITS OF UTILITY COMPUTING