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Reflections on VISION 2016 Las Vegas two weeks on

PeterGrimmond
Level 1
Employee

Two weeks ago, Veritas held its first VISION conference since becoming an independent company once more.  Since then, I have been travelling around Europe, Middle East and Africa, visiting customers and hearing their reactions to the event, to our new technology vision and strategy, and to the new offerings we announced at the conference.

On reflection, there are three things that stand out to me from the event and that have been reinforced by my subsequent customer discussions:

  1. We are incredibly fortunate to have a strong base of customers and partners who are excited to see Veritas back in the market as an independent company and are looking to us to help them solve their information management challenges as their IT landscapes rapidly evolve.  The overwhelming feedback I received from both customers and partners was positive.
  2. Our new technology vision and strategy is highly relevant and resonates strongly with our customers.  Every customer I meet is experiencing – in many cases, driving – rapid changes in their IT environment.  Faced with pressures from the business to innovate faster and to deliver new IT services more quickly, IT organisations are exploring a wide range of new approaches – agile development, devops, private and public cloud, containerisation, post-relational databases – the list is nearly endless.  As a result, IT environments are once again becoming more heterogeneous and IT infrastructure teams are struggling to assure that new IT services will deliver the right levels of performance, resilience, availability and data integrity.  This is exactly the challenge that Veritas aims to address – to provide consistent data protection, IT service availability and information insight in a heterogeneous, hybrid-cloud world.
  3. The new offerings that we showcased at VISION address specific pain-points faced by many of our customers.  Let me give you just two examples:
    • As customers begin to use OpenStack at scale, they frequently face unexpected performance and data resiliency challenges. For example, virtualised workloads often compete for scarce resources, such as CPU, memory and I/O bandwidth.  As a result, customers can find that their critical workloads are impacted by “noisy neighbours”.  Also, the large, distributed, multi-component nature of OpenStack can mean that sub-system failures lead to unexpected outages of critical IT services.  Our new software-defined storage offering for OpenStack, HyperScale, is designed to address just these challenges: it delivers a predictable, high-performance storage sub-system, with built-in resiliency and data protection.  It fully integrates into the OpenStack framework, providing easy, GUI-based storage provisioning and management through Horizon.
    • New scale-out application architectures are driving a proliferation of virtual servers, with the components of a single IT service often distributed across tens, if not hundreds, of virtual machines, which could be located across several environments in multiple data centres.  Assuring the resiliency of a given IT service has become very complex.  Assuring the resiliency of all the IT services in an enterprise is a near-impossible challenge.  But it is this specific problem that the new Veritas Resiliency Platform is designed to address.  With an application-level focus, Resiliency Platform allows enterprises to fully automate the recovery of multi-tier business applications across a wide range of platforms.

At VISION, I was asked by a journalist what I thought Veritas’ biggest challenge was for the future.  For me, it’s clear: our customers have trusted Veritas for 20+ years to keep their information protected and their IT services available.  Our challenge now is to continue to do this as their IT environments evolve to hybrid cloud.  As I said to that journalist: “We had you covered, we have you covered and we will still have you covered”.

If you missed VISION 2016 in Las Vegas and want to find out more, you can watch recordings of the Keynote sessions on VOX.  We will also be taking VISION on the road, with local events planned for major cities worldwide over the coming months.