VERITASand Network Appliancehave agreed to expand their strategic partnership to include joint development, sales, and marketing.
The companies are mum on specifics, but they say the joint effort will initially focus on backup and data protection, information lifecycle management, and storage resource management.
The closer relationship comes on the heels of EMC’s acquisition of Legato, but VERITAS dismisses that as a competitive threat.
The expanded partnership drew praise from one industry analyst.
“IT complexity is a real challenge for users today,” says Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst at Enterprise Storage Group. “Tighter collaboration among strategic vendors, rather than vertical integration, is really what IT professionals want in order to increase the return on their IT investment. This deal shows how two market leaders can accomplish something that is not only good for each of them, but for their combined customers as well.”
VERITAS and NetApp say they will cooperatively develop and deliver integrated solutions, through joint sales and marketing, product integration and qualification, and cooperative technical support.
“VERITAS and NetApp have worked together for a number of years to integrate our best-in-class product offerings that support all major Windows, UNIX, and Linux platforms,” says VERITAS CEO Gary Bloom. “To ensure that we effectively bring our joint solutions to market, we are expanding our strategic partnership with NetApp to align our sales forces, marketing activities, and channel partners.”
“By combining our offerings into robust solutions, together we help our customers gain greater performance and value from their storage infrastructures,” says NetApp CEO Dan Warmenhoven.
The two companies highlighted a number of integrated solutions that their partnership has already produced, including advanced data protection, high
availability, and storage resource management solutions.
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