Intelligent Enterprise

A New Direction

ORACLE'S BRAIN DRAIN GOES TO THE BENEFIT OF VERITAS

What are Gary Bloom's New Year resolutions for Veritas Software Corp.? In November, he became the storage management software company's new president and CEO. He replaced Mark Leslie, who will remain chairman.

Bloom ended his 14-year stint at Oracle as executive vice president and was rumored to be next in line for the CEO job after the departure of Ray Lane, former Oracle president. But when it became clear that Larry Ellison, Oracle's volatile CEO and founder, had no intention of relinquishing his position, Bloom decided it was time to leave. He had been in talks with Veritas for several months before deciding to leave his former employer.

At Oracle, Bloom's multiple roles included head of marketing, alliance organizations, and mergers and acquisitions; he also led the team developing the next version of Oracle Internet-based software applications. Clearly, his previous experience at Oracle is a good fit for his new position at Veritas.

Leslie would like to see Bloom grow the company from $1 billion to $10 billion. Certainly Bloom is poised to take the company in any number of directions. He could lead Veritas toward more alliances, expand existing relationships -- the company currently has partnerships with heavyweights such as Microsoft, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, and IBM -- or he could take Veritas down the acquisition road to further expand Veritas' product line.

But don't expect any sudden moves in Bloom's first quarter; he is settling into his new role and taking time to learn as much as he can about the company before making any dramatic changes.

How Will Veritas Perform in 2001?

Mark Nicolette, analyst with the Gartner Group said that Veritas is well-positioned to build on its technology base in the backup and storage markets. "It's an opportunity to expand a number of current licenses and sell new functions into existing accounts because of the trend to standardize storage structure. They need to execute and continue developing their technology so that they can capitalize on this trend."

According to an AMR Research report on January 3, 2001, the storage industry grew more than 25 percent in 1999 and reached $13 billion in 2000. The research firm also stated that "about 75 percent of all new hardware dollars will be spent on storage, taking the storage area network (SAN) market to $35B by 2004."

Nicolette states that Veritas' strengths are in volume management and file systems. To acquire new backup customers, "Veritas will have to displace competitors and go after the installed base of vendors such as Hewlett-Packard, Computer Associates, and Legato," stated Nicolette. "It's a maturing market so there is only a limited amount of new business available"

As Veritas introduces SAN management, it will also be in competition with Tivoli Systems Inc. and hardware vendors such as EMC Corp. and Compaq Computer Corp. Look for Veritas to increase its competitive efforts, but not its acquisitions in 2001.

-- Chuleenan Svetvilas