How Veritas is getting its cloud on

Bill Coleman, a 25-year veteran of the tech industry, became Veritas Technologies’ CEO a little over a year ago. He’s been leading the charge to help the software vendor transition from selling legacy point storage products to creating an integrated information-management platform. The goal is to provide something that’s agnostic — will work in the cloud or on-premises or both — and that won’t require customers to invest in a constant stream of upgrades to get there.

In this installment of the IDG CEO Interview Series, Coleman sat down with IDG U.S. Media’s former Chief Content Officer, John Gallant, and spoke about how he plans to get there and what’s next for the 25-year-old company now that it’s completed its split from former parent Symantec.

Let’s start off by about helping readers understand the split of Veritas from Symantec. What drove that decision, and what does it mean for customers?

I think what drove the decision was that both the security and the data sides were undergoing transformation in the marketplace. Security is a little ahead and data is moving toward information management. I think the Symantec board felt that the synergy between the two was less and therefore being able to execute a business transformation on both sides would be better with them split apart. That’s the feeling I got when I started talking to [Symantec CEO] Mike Brown. I’d been on the board for many years — until 2011 — and he called me when he became the CEO and we talked about it right from then. I think it was just a practical business decision.

You’ve had a lot of success in business. Why did this particular opportunity entice you back in?

What really changed my mind was what’s going to happen in the next five years in information management as we move from point products — managing, storing, recovering, archiving data — to trying to leverage information wherever it is, particularly as we cloudburst to the cloud and into SaaS applications to gain insight so that our customers can transform their own business models to better compete. Twice in my life I’ve lived through disruptions — with Sun, when we basically put the minicomputer out of business, and with BEA at the dawn at the internet. And they were the most exciting times I ever had. I never thought I’d get the chance to do it again and with a company at scale. I don’t know, I guess it’s something of that excitement I’ve always had for technology that drove me back.

I want to talk a little bit more about the whole shift to this information management strategy but just a couple of quick things before we get to that. What is your number one priority now that Veritas is a standalone company?

My number one priority is to turn Veritas into the leader in the digital transformation age.

Can you expand on that a little bit more? What does that mean?

What has really surprised me is as the quarters progressed, when I meet with a customer the first thing I ask is: Would you mind telling me what your strategies, priorities are? [For] almost every one of them it’s digital transformation. One of them was the CTO of a large bank; he actually was a Sun Solaris guy years ago too. His answer was very simple: Digital transformation is taking data, turning that into information, turning that into insight and then turning that into value for our customers that we can use to go beat our competition.

That is what our enterprise customers are focusing on as their number one strategic priority. And my number one priority is to absolutely lead that to provide our customers the best solution with the broadest [number] of choices, without any need to be tied to proprietary hardware or software.

In preparing for this I read some of the interviews with you and things that you’ve written as well. I get the sense that you describe Symantec’s ownership of Veritas as a kind of benign neglect. What have you had to fix because of that neglect?

That separation happened 14 months ago. Like anything, there were things that needed to be tuned up. I basically had three priorities in the first fiscal year. Number one was to gain cloud relevance. Number two was to move our product set to an integrated platform that could address compliance and digital transformation. Number three was to build the leadership team and the culture that can execute on the first two.

There was a different strategy for the company while it was part of Symantec. They were beginning to develop some new products that helped us but they really didn’t have a vision on how they were going to become a leader in cloud and an integrated platform company. That’s [not] to say that Symantec was doing anything wrong. They were moving ahead on a line strategy on how you improve your products to meet the product use cases as they were evolving. The biggest thing we did was create the vision and the strategy that allowed us to really capitalize on information management.

When you took over and when the separation happened, what would you say was the state of the Veritas product line? What needed to be upgraded and what needs to maybe go away?

Nothing needs to go away. The state was this: We had and still have the highest customer satisfaction in the industry. Some of the senior sales executives I’ve hired, two of them in particular, including Scott Genereux, have both commented that at their previous companies they’d go in to meet a customer and the first ten minutes or so were all about what you can do better, what you’re doing wrong. That doesn’t happen here. Customers love our products. They really work and they’re the most heterogeneous, the most capable — but they’re legacy. The thing we had to focus on to begin with is, as I said, first cloud.

Our products weren’t consistently operating in cloud as well as on-prem. We had to fill that out. We adopted a strategy that says we want to be not just hybrid cloud but multi-cloud, where [with] one single integrated platform you can manage consistently through policy across any combination of private and public cloud providers, giving our customers a choice, and we did that. The second was they really hadn’t introduced a new product in over five years, a new organically developed product. In this last 14 months we have shipped four products that provide an integrated framework with [a] RESTful API interface that allows all of that to be run and managed as an integrated set through a software-defined storage policy framework.

Those were the big things we had to do, and I’m very proud of the team. We announced it at our Vision Conference in September and we introduced it in December, and we’re building out more and more as this year proceeds.

Just to be clear, when you say you introduced it in December, specifically what was announced?

We call it the 360 Data Management Platform. It is our NetBackup product with a RESTful API interface that allows us to integrate other products. Then our Veritas Access product, which allows you to allow all network attached storage wherever it is and it includes the policy frameworks — and now we have the software-defined storage framework. It includes Information Map, which gives [the] metadata for all your data … so you can visualize all your data wherever it is, categorize it, then use Access to manage it.

It’s our Veritas Resiliency product, which is meant for disaster recovery. But what it actually does, of course, is automate migration of data and applications and that allows for migration to and across clouds of data and applications based on policy.

Then we announced our Velocity product for copy data management. By integrating all those together we have now the only single integrated platform that can address all your data wherever it is, whether it’s compliance or digital transformation.

Where this is such a critical concept and so central to the strategy, can you talk a little bit more about what exactly you mean by a software-defined data management platform? I want to make sure that people really understand what you mean by that and what it will deliver for them.

In this platform, our 360 Data Management Platform, the primary software-defined storage capability we’re providing is the policy framework and the workflow orchestration. That’s what makes it an integrated platform. Based on policy you can look at all the metadata of all your information categories like the general data protection regulations for the European Union, determine where all the personal identifying information is, analyze that, be sure it’s stored appropriately to meet those regulations and manage, move or delete it as necessary and then, of course, report on it. That’s where we are now.

We also announced last year that we’re building a full microservice, container-based end-to-end platform that will . . . provide a management framework for our products and our competitors’ products that will complete the software-defined storage capabilities, adding the control plane so that you no longer have to use any proprietary hardware and other capabilities. So it’s a two-phase strategy.

At the end of this, the upshot is that people have essentially a data management and control plane that operates in the cloud and across any infrastructure that they’re using. Is that the goal to get to?

That’s exactly the goal. We’ll be basically there as we build out the rest of the platform capabilities [of] the 360 Data Management Platform capabilities between now and the end of September. We have a set of releases.

That was my question. When would people have the completed platform? When do you see this being fully rolled out?

It will culminate with our NetBackup 8.1 release this fall. Along the way, we’re expanding the data sources that you can visualize. All of the SaaS apps, whether it’s things like Salesforce or Oracle or any combination, wherever your data is you can visualize it. We’ve announced we’re extending to include an entire hyperscale volume-management capability across all of your private cloud. We’re containerizing all of our products so they can be moved in any combination even more effectively.

These are all capabilities we’ve announced as part of our strategy. And with a set of releases culminating with 8.1, we will fully encompass all of that. The reason September is so important is there will be less than three quarters then to actually fully meet the GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation] compliance and we have that automated for all your data sources with all the actions that you need to be able to perform at least six to eight months before you have to go forward. We have a practice to evaluate and determine what the plans are. We can begin to visualize data right now, but no one else can do this at scale or even has announced a product set that can do it at scale. So we’re really, really focused on it.

If I’m an existing Veritas customer, what will I have to do to get to this platform? What will I have to upgrade? What will I have to buy to get to this completed vision that you’re talking about?

The good news is we’re trying to make sure that it’s always the customers’ choice, where you’re heading with your strategy and what steps you can adopt without having to throw anything away.

The basis of this starts with NetBackup 8.0 and completes with NetBackup 8.1. The rest of the capabilities, as you adopt them, are integrated. It’s just taking advantage of incremental capabilities. You’re never going to have to replace what you currently have, you’re just going to have to be able to upgrade as you need the newer capabilities.

Information Map, for instance, has been integrated with NetBackup since last summer. We’re seeing increasingly customers adopt that to be able to do compliance on the data that they have. It started with NetBackup and now it’s into other capabilities.

Sky, one of Europe’s largest leading entertainment companies, basically adopted that last year without having to change NetBackup. All they had to do was add incremental capability of Information Map to give them visibility of their data environment to better understand how their customers are buying and using their entertainment capabilities.

I want to spend some more time talking about the cloud strategy and go into a little more depth on that. Before we do that, when you are finished rolling out this data management platform, how will that change the competitive landscape? Who will you view as your competitors at that point and how will it change the existing competitive relationships?

That’s a very good question. With this kind of a platform, talking about enterprise companies you’re really talking about our global competitors that have the capability in offering an integrated platform such as this. None of them have announced it. We think that they all have challenges to be able to duplicate what we did. Also moving to software-defined storage threatens our hardware provider competitors’ basic economics.

The real issue here is we’re all moving from selling point products to selling an integrated solution. It’s not just an integrated set of products, it’s a solution. Basically, we’re no longer training our salesforce to sell the products. We’re training them to sell the five value solutions and this includes partners, etc. to be able to do migration to the cloud, to be able to do GDPR, to be able to do the fundamentals of digital transformation.

That changes the environment dramatically. When you’re selling a point product in an established market, your only defense is to fight on price. When you’re selling a value solution you basically get to sell on value but you have to really prove yourself.

We have a very major bank who I unfortunately can’t give the name of that had about an $8 million renewal in calendar Q4. As we worked with them on their digital transformation strategy, they decided that they needed to adopt the platform so we ended up doing a $31 million phase one contract that will dramatically improve their ROI as well. It’s moving to selling an integrated solution based on customer value that will change the dynamics of the market.

I have a twofold question about VMware. One, it strikes me that this is a VMware-like strategy. . . which is to take it above the hardware and create a software solution to a problem. Also, does this put you more into competition with them in their software-defined data center strategy?

First, their software-defined data center is about software-defined networking and they really don’t have any play in the information side. I would view them as more [complementary], although they have their own transformation as the world moves to containers and microservices so they have to transform their own business even to compete. I don’t view them as a competitor in this world.

I agree with you in some ways this is similar to VMware’s strategy of a decade ago in that there is a new value proposition. VMware capitalized on: We’ll adopt virtual machines that will make it so that we can have cheaper hardware. Yes, our strategy allows you to have cheaper hardware. But our strategy is focused on what the customers need to do with their own business models to compete in their own marketplace.

It’s not about cost reduction. This is about giving our customers a platform that allows them to gain value from information so they can go out and win in their own marketplaces. I believe that this value proposition, the one I’m talking about here on information management, is the most profound value proposition we’ve had since the internet was born in that it’s about the customer winning based on leveraging the platform we provide to gain insight from their information. It’s not just about saving money by buying cheaper hardware.

This is, to me, the penultimate battle. In 10 years, when the internet is totally a utility, everything will be commoditized except information.

I want to dig in a little bit more on the cloud strategy. Can you outline what capabilities are currently available in the cloud from Veritas and what’s coming for the future?

All the new products we announced are available in the cloud and available by subscription. We can do any form of backup archiving from on-prem to the cloud. We can do any form of archiving in the cloud. We can begin to do NetBackup in the cloud now, and it will be fully there and available in a containerized mode by 8.1.

At that point you have the choice of any combination of where you want to run any of our products — and it can be to the cloud, from the cloud, in the cloud, in on-prem and across the cloud, and it’s all done by policy. The concept was give the customer full choice through only one management console of how they want to change, how they want to migrate or control data across private and public cloud platforms. That was the concept and by any model they want: Subscription, consumption or perpetual.

Can you also talk about how you’re partnering or working with major cloud companies like Amazon and Microsoft? I know, for example, you had a big announcement with Google back in December, but can you outline that strategy for readers?

We had a joint announcement with Amazon at the beginning of February, followed by a joint announcement with Microsoft two weeks later, followed by a joint announcement with Google at the beginning of March, followed by a joint announcement with IBM two weeks ago.

The first thing is all of them have a desire to have a lot of enterprise data moved to the cloud and managed in the cloud. They all also are keenly aware that no one is going to move data to the cloud if it’s an exclusive provider. I had the CEO of one of the world’s largest stock exchanges in here a couple of weeks ago who said that they are going all cloud and they’re going to use at least three cloud providers.

All of these providers know they need an information management solution. Snapshot is fine but you can’t do compliance or analytics on snapshots. You need to have some form of backup or archiving to do that.

All four of them have announced [support for] NetBackup and they all have different strategies for how they’re entering the market. The Amazon strategy is they want to really focus on migration of applications and data to the cloud. What we announced with them was NetBackup but [they also support] our InfoScale product and our Veritas Resiliency product. The VRP can automatically, based on policy, migrate data in any direction to or from or across cloud and applications. And InfoScale can allow migration of transaction processing applications — so this was a big deal for them. They can literally migrate and operate with mission-critical capabilities based on our InfoScale things like ERP from Oracle or SAP.

Microsoft’s first goal is to really be able to provide the ability for customers to do compliance, particularly for Office 365. What they needed, of course, to do that is one way to archive and that’s Enterprise Vault.Cloud we announced and two, a way to discover and analyze what data is there, and that was eDiscovery.

Google is very similar, but for a different reason. They adopted to start off with the same that Microsoft did, but their reason is they want to offer their customers the best ability to do analytics on that data, period.

They all have different strategies. IBM wanted to have a full partnership with our entire product family. They are actually one of our largest resellers in the world today. That was their announcement. They are all approaching it differently, but our strategy for customers is we give you choice in any dimension you want at any time. Does that make sense?

It makes perfect sense. In a letter you wrote — I think it was to employees although in the version I saw it didn’t say exactly to whom it was — you made a comment: As a private company we will attack new and adjacent markets with strategic and sustained investments. What does that mean?

First, it means that we’re not looking at our strategy as products. We’re looking at our strategy as solutions that address customer value. As those value cases change we’re going to be focused on that. This company was very good in focusing on half a dozen product capabilities where they literally invented the market for distributed data back in the early ’90s and they focused straight on through that. Now we’re moving to another level.

The second is the investment. In the investment side, my strategy is the best investment you can make succeed is to organically develop your products, but based on your strategy there are going to be areas as the market expands where we don’t have a core competency and we can acquire those core competencies and tuck them in. At BEA I did 24 acquisitions in six years. The joke used to be it stood for built entirely on acquisitions. It was always about here is an area that is part of our strategy that we don’t have a competence.

One, it’s a different focus point on where is the market going to gain their value and two, it is we want to be in that value proposition and if we can’t do it organically ourselves, we’re going to look to not acquire a product per se, but acquire a competence.

Almost all the software companies I acquired at BEA, after Tuxedo that is, we basically told them: You get to do what you really would love to do now. You get to throw away your code and do it right because you know everything you did wrong the last time but it’s going to be part of the integrated platform. That’s how we ended up with only one source code base.

The other thing is, as part of Symantec, Veritas was kind of hidden for a while. What do you do now to raise visibility and get Veritas back on everyone’s radar?

Strategically during the last year I said: Okay, one, we’ve got to solve the next-generation problem. That’s what 360 Data Management is all about. We are stuck in our customers’ minds, or were, as a legacy provider. What we had to do was punch the world in the face, so to say, from a marketing point of view, to say: We are not just your grandfather’s Chevrolet anymore. We’re doing more. This whole set of announcements that we just had with the leading cloud service providers in the world were meant to wake up that conversation.

Inside an IT organization there are two extreme conversations going on; one is on the legacy IT operation side: I buy some more, I buy some more, I buy some more and by the way . . . the pressure is there to reduce cost. The other is the one we needed to get into, the digital transformation; it’s all new. We weren’t in that conversation. With these announcements, what I meant to do was get the CIOs that are buying from us to say wait a minute, we ought to be looking at them.

Now we are going to begin a whole rebranding capability next month to try to take the values we’ve always had — the most heterogeneous, the most scalable, we really solve your problems, we really work — and expand that to the entire digital transformation in a multi-cloud world kind of strategy.

Is there a catch phrase or a quick phrase that describes what that vision is?

There is but I can’t preempt our marketing program.

You can tell me. We’re old friends.

Oh, yeah, we’ll do it off the record.

It does seem like there are a lot of companies talking about the importance of data and the importance of information management. I know from doing CIO roundtables, for example, that getting a better handle on the data and getting real value out of it is the central issue. I take it, though, you’re working on something that says Veritas is the X company to really cement that in people’s minds.

We are working on creating that positioning value proposition for our customers, absolutely. My philosophy was we could have started trying to do that a year ago and nobody would have listened. Before you can reposition yourself you’ve got to have credibility that what you’re positioning to you can actually do. I believe with our 360 Data Management Platform, with proving we are relevant in the cloud, we now have credibility and I want to rebrand us — but mostly I want to tie us to a positioning in our target customers’ minds that we are relevant there. Because once we do that, I think we will set a new bar for the global companies that are dealing with that…

Who else are you going to look at to start with, that can credibly can say they can visualize and manage all of your data no matter where it is, give you the full choice and not try to lock you into proprietary hardware or software.

As a last question, if you run into somebody, that classic elevator situation, what is it you absolutely want a CIO or another senior IT executive to know about the new Veritas?

The new Veritas, number one, provides the only integrated solution that can solve your strategic priorities of digital transformation and meeting compliance. Number two, we can give you choice in any dimension — how fast you want to go, how you want to license it and what combination of hybrid and multi-cloud environments you want. Number three, that we’re not focused on selling you products. We’re focused on selling you value that improves your ability to compete at a better ROI than you have today.

John Gallant was most recently IDG U.S. Media’s Chief Content Officer.