The contradictory demands of today's end users

Veritas' CEO uses conference keynote to suggest customers have three main priorities

End users want both lower IT costs and to spend huge sums of money on compliance, according to Bill Coleman, CEO of Veritas.

Coleman used his keynote at the Veritas Vision conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday to detail what the vendor is hearing from customers in the market.

"Almost 20 months ago we separated Veritas from Symantec and I started to look around and I discovered something: information is growing like crazy, but the pressures on pricing were very dramatic," he said.

"We figured out that our customers have three priorities. Number one, cut IT costs. I met with the CIOs of two of the largest banks in the world. The first one said 'I have to cut IT costs by half a billion dollars'. The second one said 'I have to cut IT costs by a billion dollars'.

"However, the second priority for customers is spending whatever is necessary to meet the escalating governance and compliance problems. So lower spend, but spend more money here [on compliance].

"The third priority for customers is 'we have to do digital transformation', so those firms can move forward."

Coleman said that when it came to digital transformation, it is vital to be able to harness the power of information within an organisation.

"At Veritas, we needed to take a step back and ask 'are we relevant'? And do you know what we found? We found that we were operating in a declining market because we were mostly considered to be covering legacy [systems]. This put us in a real dilemma," he added.

Coleman said the Veritas leadership determined what to do. The answer resided in winning the "digital transformation wars", he said, by more directly solving the priorities of customers. The vendor also announced a string of cloud-based products at the conference.