Veritas Technologies LLC’s rebranding as a multicloud data management platform has the company darting in many directions. This week’s Veritas Vision conference in Las Vegas is ridden with announcements from a new cloud deduplication engine to a partnership with Microsoft Corp.’s Azure cloud.

Today, Dave Vellante (@dvellante) (pictured, left) and Stu Miniman (@stu) (pictured, right), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, scratched out the SparkNotes to the long list of announcements.

“Really, it’s the expansion of their software-defined storage, the family of products called InfoScale,” Miniman said. Of these announcements, Veritas HyperScale and Veritas Cloud Storage were the standouts. (* Disclosure below.)

Standalone cloud copycat

Veritas HyperScale software-defined storage comes in two flavors — one for OpenStack-based clouds and one for containers (a virtualized method for running distributed applications). Since OpenStack offers options for both block and file storage, Veritas HyperScale for OpenStack will likely support both, according to Miniman.

On the strictly object-based side of things, Veritas Cloud Storage is, according to Veritas, object storage with brains. This seems slightly redundant, since object storage has never donned the dunce cap anyway.

“Those brains — what is that functionality? Because object storage, from day one, always had a little bit more intelligence than the traditional storage,” Miniman said.

Object storage usually has metadata built in, so we can easily expect Veritas Cloud Storage will have that as well. “So where is the artificial intelligence, machine learning? What is that knowledge that’s kind of built into it?” Miniman asked. TheCUBE will be digging into these questions as the conference moves forward.

Veritas was doing software-defined storage well before it caught on in the mainstream, Vellante noted. However, object storage is uncharted terrain for the company, he said.

“I mean there’s a lot of object going on out there — but it’s not really taken off other than with the cloud guys,” Vellante said, citing Amazon Web Services Inc.’s S3 as the prime example. Veritas is now throwing its hat in the ring — a bit late by cloud provider standards. But among standalone software companies, “It really hasn’t even taken off yet, so maybe the timing’s not so bad,” Vellante said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Veritas Vision 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Veritas Vision 2017. Neither Veritas Technologies LLC nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE