UPDATED 20:34 EDT / SEPTEMBER 19 2017

CLOUD

Veritas platform upgrades, Microsoft deal strengthen data management portfolio

In the multicloud, software-defined, hyperscale world, Veritas Technologies LLC is all in. The company that separated from Symantec Corp. over two years ago is now firmly on the path to identify itself as a leading data management business, recognizing that information is the coin of the realm. And Veritas made a series of major product and partnership announcements today designed to further that cause.

“Now we finally get to move from technology to information. This is where the power is going to be,” said Veritas Chief Executive Officer Bill Coleman (pictured), in his kickoff remarks during today’s keynote at the Veritas Vision conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. (* Disclosure below.)

The company announced NetBackup 8.1 enterprise software, a unified data protection platform that will be a key element of the Veritas 360 Data Management product set. NetBackup 8.1 includes single console management and will provide deduplication for customers in multicloud environments.

The deduplication technology — NetBackup Cloud Catalyst — is designed to save customers time and money when they store data in the cloud. Company officials believe it is the first dedupe engine that has been certified for cloud providers.

Veritas is getting closer to cloud providers in another way. The company also announced a new strategic partnership with Microsoft Azure that brings Veritas’ 360 Data Management portfolio to the public cloud. This will provide integrated data protection enhancements for Azure, such as snapshot management and tools for moving data into and out of the cloud environment.

The Microsoft announcement follows earlier agreements between Veritas and other cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services Inc., Google LLC and IBM Corp. Veritas has been a Microsoft partner for 25 years, according to Mike Palmer, executive vice president and chief product officer at Veritas. While Tuesday’s announcements centered around Microsoft, it appears that Veritas has just begun to form new partnership agreements with cloud providers.

“There are more to come,” said Coleman, without providing further details.

Customer synergy with Microsoft

The partnership with Veritas underscores Microsoft’s interest in making sure that customers know where their data resides and can manage it accordingly, something that fits neatly into the Veritas gameplan.

“Their customers are our customers,” said Mark Russinovich, chief technology officer for Microsoft Azure, who appeared briefly during the keynote presentations. “We don’t enter these kinds of things lightly,” he said.

Next quarter, Veritas will be offering the NetBackup 5340 Appliance as part of its enhanced data protection portfolio. It can be used in a data center or in a multicloud environment. “Data protection is very much an insurance policy,” said Palmer, who highlighted increased capacity and management simplicity among the new appliance’s features.

Veritas also made announcements involving snapshot management and interactive viewing capabilities for data assets. Veritas CloudPoint will give customers the ability to orchestrate snapshots from the Azure cloud to speed recovery.

Real-time data visibility and solving object storage issues

The company also took another step forward with its Information Map product. Created as a way to provide visibility for data governed by Veritas NetBackup, the firm added the S3 Connector earlier this year to extend that same capability for users in the Amazon cloud. Now, Information Map has a connector to Azure that will provide real-time visibility for unstructured data.

Being able to identify data and migration paths in multicloud platforms is going to become more significant in the future. Finding and removing data is an important element of General Data Protection Regulation, the European Union’s strict, new legal requirements scheduled to take effect in the middle of next year.

Today’s announcements did not ignore the growing trend toward integration of machine learning tools for data management. Veritas Access, a new file-based, software-defined storage product, will have embedded machine learning. The company also announced a new program called Veritas Design, which will be based on daily interaction with thousands of customers. More details on this are forthcoming, but the program will also apparently rely on machine learning tools.

“Analytics and machine learning are the promise of the future,” Palmer said.

Veritas is also tackling the thorny problem of object storage, mindful that developers favor disk-neutral models rather than storage architected in file-and-block. The problem, as described by Palmer, is that “data goes to die in object store.” The company announced enhancements to the Veritas Cloud Storage platform designed to address some of these issues.

Veritas has come a long way since its Symantec split. The company reminded the gathering today that it has been in Gartner Inc.’s Magic Quadrant for data center backup and recovery since the firm first started rating companies in the space.

The company’s news on Tuesday appeared to be clearly geared toward meeting the multicloud enterprise needs of growing companies. Veritas executives cited statistics showing that 86 percent of Fortune 500 companies were customers and more than half of those had a cloud-first strategy.

“We’re very proud of where we are. Veritas wants to be the trusted company you can count on,” Coleman concluded.

Stay tuned for the complete video interview, 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.)

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