This week, I had the privilege of being part of Veritas’ global Sales Conference (VSC), which Veritas themed as ‘Right Now FY18.’ Much of my early career was in pre-sales engineering and field enablement, so I always enjoy “internal” conferences, as much if not more than “external” trade shows, because:
Internal events, whether sales kickoffs or influencer events, are full of passionate “how can we help customers with their data protection challenges?” Said another way, I get the chance to hang out with a very large group of folks that ‘get it.’
And internal events lets you see the real character and culture of an organization … from what the unfiltered vision is from the executives to the foundational narratives that the field is being equipped to carry forth with consistency, as well as compelling credibility (hopefully).
And that brings us to Veritas. The Symantec days seem far behind them as everyone at Veritas is focused not on NetBackup, or Enterprise Vault, or any ‘product’ per se. They are focused on solutions and outcomes that are powered by the entire Veritas 360 Data Management portfolio, which is soooo smart! As much as NetBackup holds its own among enterprise backup platforms or EV for data archiving, the real differentiation that matters is what happens when you utilize backup … plus archiving … plus heterogeneous storage agility … plus real availability mechanisms … plus DevOps enablement … plus … (you get the idea).
OH, and 20 minutes after I left the stage, Sammy Hagar came on to belt out his ‘Right Now’ classic for the conference, as well as a few other classics. There is a wonderful adage on “Grow your people so that they could leave, but treat them so well that they won’t want to.” Who else brings a rocker like that to an internal conference to energize their team?!?! Well done!
Ps, I choose to believe that on May 2nd 2017, I (un)officially opened for Sammy Hagar. Just sayin …
The days of dedicated and isolated data protection, data management, data preservation, and data availability are nearly over – so the power for both customers and vendors has to come from the synergy of solution outcomes that are potentially powered by a consolidated set of capabilites. From the top of the org on the main stage to the breakouts throughout the event, Veritas understands that; and is looking forward to raising the conversation up from this product widget or that license whatchamacallit.