Veritas Technologies LLC once blazoned the phrase no hardware agenda on billboards and T-shirts to promote its software-only storage over competitors like EMC. Years later, the company is again touting its standalone software status — this time in data management.

“No hardware agenda is evolving to no cloud agenda,” said Dave Vellante (@dvellante) (pictured, left), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio.

While many public cloud providers offer data management, Veritas is billing itself as the single standalone solution that can traverse them all. Vellante and co-host Stu Miniman (@stu) (pictured, right) gauged Veritas’ place among other data management comers during the close of this week’s Veritas Vision conference in Las Vegas. (* Disclosure below.)

Plenty of companies are developing data management solutions already, and there is reason to expect even more will enter the market. “I think the TAM [total addressable market] is going to explode, because it’s not about backup, and it’s not even just about data protection. It is about information management,” Vellante said.

Upstarts like Cohesity Inc. and Rubrik Inc. are doing interesting work in data management, but they may not have the “heft” to translate it to multicloud, according to Vellante. Rubrik has added cloud components recently, but “they tend to start from an on-premises piece,” Miniman added.

Veritas punches above its weight

Behemoths Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. and IBM Corp., on the other hand, do have the muscle for multicloud. “But is it going to be the main focus of those companies?” Vellante asked. Perhaps not, but an infusion from an energetic backup and data management specialist — like Veeam Software Inc. — may fill the gap.

“HPE and Veeam are an interesting partnership,” Vellante said.

Veritas hits the sweet spot between hefty hardware-legacy and lithe startup. It claims this middle ground gives it the freedom and the research and development capital to perfect data and information management. It still has much to prove. But if its message around the General Data Protection Regulation, which aims to strengthen data protection in the European Union, at the show is any indication, it is making headway.

“It was the most crisp conversation I’ve heard on GDPR,” Miniman 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