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Veritas Sees No Problem: Page 3 of 4

“VMware is kind of an interesting acquisition… pretty far out of their traditional storage domain,” Bloom says. “There are other efforts underway besides VMware. There's also technology being developed by Microsoft through an acquisition they did, and [that] is an environment that we would probably end up supporting if our customers use it.”

With $2.5 billion in cash, Veritas might do some more shopping in 2004 but so far hasn’t had much success with the 2003 acquisition of Precise Software Solutions (see Veritas Picks Up Precise). Veritas reported its second straight disappointing quarter of revenue from Precise's application performance management software, but said it did make some recent sales that will show up as first-quarter revenue. In future quarters, Veritas will report Precise’s revenue as part of a utility computing infrastructure category.

Despite failing to meet analysts’ expected guidance, Bloom echoes the claims of other storage company CIOs by predicting a strong year of customer spending in 2004, saying Veritas is sticking to its goal of $2 billion in revenue for the year.

“We view 2004 as a growth year, with growth more heavily weighted to the second half of the year,” he says. “While our level of growth depends on a continued IT spending recovery, our business is strong and we expect to drive the company from $1.77 billion in annual revenues in 2003 to a target of $2 billion in 2004.”

Early this afternoon, Veritas’s stock was trading at $31.46, down $5.01 (13.74%).