Veritas recruits IBMer to head up four-way consulting business

Rethink IT, June, 2004

Veritas went into the consulting business in a big way last month, pushing its utility computing approach.

First off it has recruited an IBM Global Services VP in Michael Sinneck, as senior vice president Veritas Consulting, bringing over 35 years of experience to the task, and his first step is to break the fledgling Veritas consulting business into four main thrusts--disaster recovery, storage management, application performance management and utility computing, the last one defined as using service level agreements and metering to chargeback IT services.

The move comes after Veritas' first effort at consulting, offering what it called Business Critical Support, gained acceptance at over 70 strategic customers worldwide.

This included proactive support from a dedicated account manager and team of senior software experts, personalized support planning, priority case handling and exclusive access to advanced training.

Veritas will also push its training program, dubbed the Certified Professional Program, harder. Already Veritas says it trains 25,000 people each year in system availability, performance and automation.

And to make sure that Veritas keeps its offerings for utility computing on track, it has recruited a team of advisers from the user community, called theVeritas Utility Computing Customer Advisory Board (CAB).

The Utility Computing CAB members will partner with Veritas executives to shape its utility computing business strategy.

Founding members include IT leaders from the Chicago Board of Trade, Corrections Corporation of America, DHL and United Airlines Loyalty Services.

In conjunction with the Utility Computing CAB, Veritas has formed an internal Customer Advocacy Executive Steering Committee, which will provide a consistent channel from customers to management, to take into consideration when setting the company's R&D priorities.

Finally this week Veritas laid out the future roadmap for its offerings in Application Performance Management and its Veritas i3 7.0 software, which is going beta in the summer and on to general release before the end of the year.

Veritas said version 7.0 will feature integration with other Veritas systems to provide deeper file system, volume management and storage metrics. The aim is to measure the time its takes transactions to traverse the entire IT infrastructure from customers to storage.

Other new features of Veritas i3 7.0 will include the ability for users to track an unlimited number of customer defined service level agreement metrics and a streamlined install process for faster deployment.