This week, the newly unencumbered Veritas (from Symantec) relaunched its premier user event – Veritas Vision. There was a palpable energy that resonated around “we’re back and ready to resume our leadership mantle,” starting with an impressive day one from main stage:
- Bill Coleman (CEO) started the event by making “information is everything” personal by tying medical data to a young girl with health struggles, which gave context that would resonate with everyone — which then got “real” by revealing her as Bill’s niece.
- Ana Pinczuk (CPO) introduced us to the journey that Veritas wants to partner with its customers and ecosystem – from what you already rely on Veritas for to ambitious data management and enablement, with an impressive array of announcements, almost all of which coupled Veritas’ established flagships with emerging offerings that unlock some very cool data-centric capabilities.
- Mike Palmer (SVP, Data Insights), who is arguably the best voice on the Veritas stage in a very long time, delivered a brilliant session describing data and metadata through the movie InsideOut, tying the movie’s memory globes to data, the colors to meta data, combined with formative insights, pools of repositories and outcomes, etc. I’ll be hard pressed to use any other analogy to describe metadata for a long time to come. Vendors, if you want to see how to completely nail a keynote, watch the recordng of Mike’s session.
And that was just the first two hours. Along the way, the new Veritas also wanted everyone to know that they are combining two decades of storage/data protection innovation with a youthful, feisty aggressiveness against perceived legacy technologies, with EMC + Dell being the punchline of many puns and direct takedowns. That could have come across as mean or disrespectful, but was delivered with enough wit that it served to bring the room together. The competitive digs may have had arguable merit, but they clearly cast Veritas as a software-centric, data-minded contrast to hardware vendors – with a level of spunk that ought to energize its field, partners, and customer base.
As further testament to their approach for combining flagships with emerging offerings, many of the breakouts leveraged multiple, integrated Veritas products for solution-centric outcomes — which candidly is their best route to the ambitious journey that Veritas is embarking on. Glueing together their new journey through integrated solutions that are then underpinned by products (instead of jumping straight to what’s new in product X this year) will be a key to watch for as the new Veritas continues to redefine itself. As a reminder that “Veritas” is much more than “NetBackup,” check out their current portfolio.
For further impressions on the event, check out ESG’s video coverage from the event:
Congratulations Veritas on a fresh vision (and Vision) that ought to propel you into some exciting opportunities.
[Originally blogged via ESG’s Technical Optimist.com]