Veritas grovels after split causes partner 'pain'

Vendor begins partner conference with grovelling apology

Veritas kicked off its EMEA partner conference with a grovelling apology after admitting its split from Symantec is causing "pain" and "frustration" in its channel.

Veritas and Symantec will formally split in January when the former gets taken over by private equity firm Carlyle, but they split operationally three weeks ago. A number of technical hitches happened during this process and only some of them have been resolved.

The vendor started its Partner Link conference in Monaco today by apologising profusely for the trouble.

Before any executives took to the stage with their presentations and plans for the future, the firm addressed the issues partners had faced in a bid to convince them it is taking them seriously.

"It is important for me, before we start looking at the opportunity and all the great things we are going to do in the marketplace together, that you know that I am honest every day," said Veritas' senior vice president for EMEA, Matt Ellard.

"It is important you know [that we know] how much pain it is causing you and is causing us as well. And, again, we are sorry for that. We are working through it. During a separation these things happen. I don't want you to think we are glossing over that at this conference.

"We know some of you missed month end and we know some of you missed year end last week and we do apologise for that."

As part of the split, Veritas reduced the number of ERP applications it runs from five to one, cut the number of SKUs available by 40 per cent and overhauled its price lists.

Brett Shirk, Veritas' executive vice president for worldwide sales, described the process as "disentangling 10 years of entanglement with Symantec" and apologised to partners.

"As part of Symantec we had five different ERP applications and 8,000 customisations," he said. "We've taken that down to one ERP with 800 customisations. You can imagine the amount of business processes changes as a result of [moving from] significant complexity to simplicity. But there's a lot of complexity in going from complex to simple!

"And when you combine all of those complexities, as we conducted business separately from Symantec, we had some issues come up. But we resolved those issues. It's a pretty normal course of business when you make that type of change over. We will probably still hit some speed bumps but we don't expect it to impact our quarter end."