Veritas tightens Microsoft ties to target 'struggling customers'

Vendors highlight 'mutual channels' as end users wrestle with move to cloud

Veritas has used its Las Vegas conference to further link arms with Microsoft Azure as customers continue to struggle with data challenges and cloud shifts.

Mike Palmer, executive vice president and chief product officer at Veritas, said at the firm's Veritas Vision conference that its customers are adopting cloud at an "unprecedented pace", but challenges remain.

"Those customers have a legacy of applications, many of which were built 20 or 30 years ago and eventually evolved. Now they are moving into the public cloud, but they are struggling with how to make that pivot," he said.

"These struggles include how to build native applications and how to manage deploying applications in a global environment. They also continue to struggle with visibility of data, particularly around data which is regulated."

Palmer said regulations such as GDPR are seeing companies need to form data retention policies where in the past they had data deletion policies.

"Our customers are struggling and we know that all the technology transformation that is happening is driving a lot of these concerns, but that is also driving a lot of opportunity for us and our partners," added Palmer.

Mark Russinovich, CTO of Microsoft Azure at Microsoft, claimed the partnership with Veritas works well due to the vendors' joint understanding of the enterprise space.

"We are working closely with Veritas around the integration of its technology with Azure so they can produce a high-performing and secure product. We have go-to-market plans together and we also have mutual channels that work together."

Veritas has announced various 360 data management expansions for Veritas and Microsoft Azure customers. These include new additions around business continuity and disaster-recovery readiness, hybrid cloud scale-out storage optimisation and data visualisation across disparate sources.