VERITAS Software reached a milestone today as it celebrated its 15th anniversary as a consistent innovator and leader in providing to customers computing solutions.

Rather than focusing solely on its achievements on such a day,  VERITAS is taking the time to reaffirm its business philosophy that puts servicing customers and their needs ahead of everything else. Moreover, in keeping with its history as an innovator, the company announced that it's positioned to bring the next computing paradigm - utility computing - to its customers.

Co-founder Dale Shipley formed Tolerant Software in 1988 with the noble-minded intention of fostering engineering excellence through software development aimed at ensuring the availability of computing systems and mission-critical applications. VERITAS Software emerged from Tolerant Software in 1989 which itself emerged from Tolerant Transaction Systems. Flash-forward fifteen years and one now finds a company that is a leading independent provider of software enabling utility computing, with over 7,100 employees and business enterprises in more than 40 countries around the world.

Reflecting upon the modest roots of VERITAS, Shipley said:

"From the beginning in 1989 when we formed VERITAS Software the cornerstone of our success centered upon convincing and securing the support of AT&T UNIX System Laboratories, Inc. to trust us to extract the valuable code from the Tolerant Systems high availability operating system and develop and deliver the industry's first robust UNIX System V transaction-based volume manager and file system thereby contributing the early success of AT&T and Sun Microsystems in the promising UNIX marketplace."

In describing how intelligent risk-taking enabled VERITAS to flourish, Shipley added, "It was this calculated risk that opened the door to the broad horizontal adoption of VERITAS software by the myriad of UNIX systems vendors and paved the path toward the company's leadership in storage management and data protection. The company's initial value proposition still holds true today, a company's most valuable IT assets are not the hardware systems, but rather the data that resides on, and runs across them and the protection and availability of that data is paramount."

When VERITAS initially began developing its business plan, the company kept things remarkably focused and simple. A hallmark of many great business ventures. Just starting to make its way in the world, the company strategized on three priorities that would be their focal point. Namely, the elimination of system downtime, the simplification of overly complex tasks and development of a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to visualize storage management and administrative tasks, and lastly, the adoption of a maniacal focus toward enhancing the performance of systems.

At a time when customers' file systems were "naturally" serviced by the manufacturer of their operating systems, VERITAS' proposition, calling for the independent servicing of enterprise file systems, seemed absurd. However, the company was able to not only convince customers that the start-up could provide better support of their files, but VERITAS backed this claim up with objective benchmarks so customers could see what they were gaining. Thus, VERITAS Volume Manager was introduced in 1990 and VERITAS File System in 1991. The products are two of the company's flagship products that can be found at the heart of nearly 70 percent of the world's data centers today.

Highlighting the company's customer centric philosophy, John Colgrove, VERITAS Fellow and 15 year veteran, VERITAS, said, "If you listen to customer's problems and what they're trying to do and you listen to their goals you get ideas for how you can go and create solutions to solve them. This remains our long term approach and we're working on some very interesting things for customers that will really deliver huge value when they choose our software."

VERITAS' customer base encompasses both small business and large corporations running highly complex enterprise systems. Both these business segments have helped to make VERITAS the industry standard for data backup and protection. VERITAS merged with OpenVision in 1997 and delivered its first release of VERITAS NetBackup software to customers. The company's engineers designed the software to provide maximum backup capabilities with the least disruption to end users. It does not seem surprising then that NetBackup is the No.1 backup and recovery software that allows companies to reduce costs by taking advantage of advanced enterprise features, such as synthetics, disk-based protection, automated disaster recovery, and desktop and laptop protection.

As the company advances, it brings to its customers a history steeped in providing solutions that are not only cutting-edge, but also extremely employable in reducing costs and preparing for revolutions that are gearing to take place. With grid computing, IT managers are being encouraged to shift from reactive problem resolution to proactive availability and failover testing of servers, storage systems, and applications before effecting business. By combining VERITAS Cluster Server with VERITAS i3, VERITAS OpForce and VERITAS UpScale software (to be released in 2005), IT managers will realize how much automating IT infrastructure can save their company.

Oleg Kiselev, technical director and 14 year veteran, VERITAS, speaking of utility computing said, "Utility computing is much like the box filled with wooden building blocks at your child's school; one day the children share the blocks to build a castle and a space station and the next day they use the same blocks to build whatever their imaginations come up with. Now apply that analogy to a box full of IT building blocks-- storage, servers, switches, and software. With VERITAS software, IT can provision those resources when they're needed, where they're needed, as they're needed and when they are no longer needed they can place them back in a resource pool or put them back in the box. Add to this the ability to automatically specify and maintain agreed upon application service and availability levels and provide fine-grain usage accounting and you have a powerful set of building blocks. In a nutshell our approach is to deliver the software building blocks that enable utility computing."

VERITAS today is one of the 10 largest software companies in the world. Using a utility computing model, VERITAS aligns IT resources with business needs. Ninety-nine percent of the Fortune 500 Companies use VERITAS products for data protection, storage and server management, and application performance management.