Veritas CEO: We are back

Las Vegas conference kicks off as the vendor hits out at Dell and EMC

Veritas took a pop at Dell EMC as it kicked off its first independent Veritas Vision conference since 2005.

Lynn Lucas, chief marketing officer at Veritas, started the keynote reminding customers and partners that the event in Las Vegas this week is the first independent Vision conference in more than a decade.

She said: "In 2005, at the last independent conference, YouTube had just been launched. MySpace was still vying to be a major social media player. Businesses were just beginning their digital transformation. Now, we are independent again. We have a new leadership team but one thing hasn't changed: our bold independent spirit."

Veritas was acquired by Symantec in 2005, and the company then split back into two in 2015, before Veritas was sold to private investor The Carlyle Group in February 2016.

Lucas announced a new marketing campaign which hits out at the Dell EMC acquisition. The advert stated: "What's worse than a lifetime of hardware with EMC? An eternity in Dell."

She explained: "Our core values - a technology-agnostic approach, the idea that software drives the value in your data and that information is more important that infrastructure - these beliefs are very much alive and well. Not everyone in our industry shares that philosophy. Some would rather just sell you hardware."

Veritas CEO Bill Coleman - who joined the company as part of the Carlyle Group acquisition - took to the stage to announce that the vendor is building an enterprise data management platform which will be technology agnostic. He didn't specify when the platform would be finished.

Coleman ended his speech by thanking partners for sticking with the vendor. He added: "We're back."

Ana Pinczuk, chief product officer at Veritas, referenced research by Gartner which predicted that by 2020, IoT is expected to generate over 54 billion GB of data annually, as she announced that the vendor's cloud data management platform will now support OpenStack and Microsoft Azure.

Other announcements today included the introduction of usage-based licensing for the vendor's NetBackup solution, meaning customers can now "pay-as-you-go".

Pinczuk also introduced Veritas Access, which is a scale-up, network attached storage solution. The new product is designed to allow access to all data on premise and off premise, on public or private clouds.