Veritas sees upsell potential for channel

Veritas has launched a series of products which it believes will represent upsell opportunities for channel partners, as they can be pitched as natural progressions from its flagship system and applications software.

The first is CommandCentral Service, which interacts with the company's Foundation Suite (File System, Volume Manager and SanPoint Control) and its backup products (NetBackup and Backup Exec) to enable a utility computing environment.

Corporate IT departments will be able to use the service to offer storage and, in future, processing capacity to the various divisions within the organisation.

Since many corporates will not be end-to-end Veritas users, the product is also able to work with other file systems and backup products, explained Mark Bregman, executive vice president of product operations at Veritas.

The second is Data Lifecycle Manager, for which Veritas will use selected VARs in its data protection (i.e. NetBackup) channel to sell software that manages the movement of data from online to offline media and through to archive, taking into account issues of compliance with data retention legislation.

Finally there is the Desktop and Laptop Option on the latest version of NetBackup (5.0), which Veritas believes should be an easy sell.

"Our research shows that 86 per cent of organisations in Europe don't protect their mobile data or desktops as part of their planning," said Chris Boorman, marketing vice president for EMEA at Veritas.

Simon Gay, consultancy practice leader at storage reseller Computacenter, commented that, with the utility computing and Data Lifecycle Manager launches, "Veritas is building on the core strength of its ownership of the file system and consequent understanding of customers' data structures, recognising that data management is the area in which companies need to be moving."