Cloud is a convenient improvement over hardware for customers as well software and service partners — well, mostly. For the latter, cloud presents some tricky competitive issues due to cloud providers’ ability to deliver services themselves. Veritas Technologies LLC came to realize this over the past year as it worked to integrate with major cloud providers.

“We thought we were going to throw a thin layer of capability on top of the clouds — and in effect commoditize them ourselves,” said Mike Palmer (pictured), executive vice president and chief product officer at Veritas.

The company aimed to provide a vessel it could effortlessly sail among different clouds without any thought to the cloud’s underlying services. “And obviously, if you’re a cloud provider, that is not an approach that you’re a big fan of,” Palmer said.

Palmer spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Veritas Vision conference in Las Vegas. (* Disclosure below.)

Compatibility hassles off Veritas’ plate

Veritas has since revised its cloud partnering approach to be more provider-friendly. “Our approach today is very deep-level integration with each cloud provider and the specialization they’re bringing to the market,” Palmer said. Its engineers have achieved these integrations without sacrificing the portability of Veritas’ data protection and management platform solutions, he added.

Cooperating with cloud providers in this way has actually made life easier for Veritas. “The cloud providers take accountability for regression testing all of the things that they release to their customers,” Palmer said. When Veritas adopts an application program interface, for instance, the company already knows it will work since the providers control for such things.

Customers win from this arrangement as well, according to Palmer. Veritas would probably not get far asking its base to forgo all of the services cloud providers are churning out, he added. “Frankly, it’s a disservice to the customers, because they are building some really valuable services,” Palmer concluded.

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