With a new breed of software applications emerging, spanning machine learning, artificial intelligence and the internet of things, it can be difficult for businesses to keep pace. Developing and running these novel and highly complex apps is trying. Having a single place to manage and protect the precious data involved can help reign in the tumult.

This situation is driving the adoption of new data-management tools that eschew silos for a single space for all the data, according to Greg Hughes (pictured), chief executive officer of Veritas Technologies LLC. Without such consolidation, “it will just be in silos,” Hughes said. “It becomes very hard to manage and protect it.”

Veritas is in a unique position to standardize data protection across different areas since it is the market leader in both data protection and software-defined storage, Hughes pointed out. “We can use that scale to invest more aggressively than anybody else in those areas,” he said.

Hughes spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Veritas Vision Solution Day event in New York City. They discussed Hughes’ takeaways from customer conversations and the importance of moving away from siloed data for modern applications. (* Disclosure below.)

Garbage in, garbage (and lots of APIs) out

A large chunk of Hughes’ workday as the CEO of Veritas is spent absorbing feedback from customers, and they are reverberating a similar message: They want a backup solution that goes with workloads wherever infrastructure takes them. Veritas is answering.

Veritas’ announcement with Pure Storage Inc. allows customers to protect Pure Storage all-flash arrays with Veritas’ NetBackup. The idea is to “continually make sure that across this ecosystem of partners, we are the one player that can help our large customers,” Hughes stated.

Veritas NetBackup 8.1.2 significantly leverages application program interfaces that allow customers to automate processes and tie NetBackup into whatever infrastructure they run on. “We’re going to continue full-throttle on APIs,” Hughes said. “Just having lunch with some customers today; they want us to go even further in our APIs.”

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE