Back in December 2004, Symantec and Veritas Software announced a planned merger estimated at US$13.5 billion. At the time, it was the merger of a leading data protection vendor (Symantec) with a information management vendor (Veritas Software). By July 2005, it became leader that the new company would retain the products of both organizations although over the succeeding years, the data protection portfolio grew considerably whilst the data management business barely grew (prior to the ‘merger’ Veritas Software was earning just under US$2 billion (for the 12 months ending 9/30/2004) and fast forward nearly ten years later, the Veritas business generated US$2.5 billion in revenue for Symantec. That’s a CAGR of three percent over the last ten years.
 
The Information Management business, to be called Veritas Technologies Corporation, will include backup and recovery, archiving, eDiscovery, storage management and information availability solutions.
 
Per the Symantec press release:
“Veritas remains a powerful brand that still has tremendous equity with our customers, partners and employees, and after careful review it was an easy choice as the name for our information management business,” said Michael A. Brown, Symantec president and chief executive officer.
 
During the ten year period following the 2004 acquisition, it was obvious that the information management business unit which kept the Veritas name as a product portfolio lost much of its clout in the heterogeneous data storage management space, as once partners became competitors through acquisitions.
 
Is there still a future for Veritas Technologies in the cloud-era? Only time will tell. My personal guess is yes, particularly as the market moves closer to accepting the "software-defined anything" future. It will take the new Veritas Technologies company a lot of work to get back its grove. Hopefully the new company will finally get its focus back and fast track development to meet the challenges of the cloud era. Hopefully it can also gain back the confidence of its partners - many of whom are competitors now.