Q+A: Veritas chief executive Gary Bloom

Gary Bloom has been chief executive of storage software specialist Veritas for 18 months, after spending 14 years at Oracle, most recently as Larry Ellison's right-hand man. Veritas is growing and outperforming many of its peers during a time of economic gloom. And according to Bloom, his friend Larry taught him all he knows.

Veritas is one of the top 10 software companies in the world, yet many of the people using your software don't even know that it came from Veritas. Is that a problem?

We're not very well known outside of the core IT market. People maintaining systems and IT directors putting in technology to deliver high availability, they know who we are. I meet with a lot of chief executives and they say, 'Who's Veritas?'. The reality is the chief executive is not making the buying recommendation or decision. The IT community knows who we are.

Are you happy with this position?

It's important as we start competing more and as Microsoft enters the storage market, as IBM, EMC and Sun Microsystems compete with us more. None of them have what we have, but they are all bigger than we are. As we start competing against these kind of players, we're going to need to be more visible in the market place.

Storage hardware vendors such as EMC are starting to make waves in the software market. How are you dealing with this additional competition?

All the hardware vendors, particularly in storage, have seen their margins decline. They have decided that the value is in the software. And we would completely agree with them. The reality is that the majority of our relationships with EMC, with Sun, with IBM, while there is some competitive overlap, it really is a very co-operative partnership. We're competing much more heavily around the vision of the future than we are around products and solutions being delivered today. They have a significant challenge ahead of them in that they have a hardware agenda and the difficulty of trying to build heterogeneous software.

But the most significant change in the storage market isn't the competitive landscape. It's the convergence of networks and storage. And it's the work that's being done to move intelligence into the server and the storage device. The intelligence is moving to the fabric of the network. We're putting intelligence into the network switches and devices.

What can we expect to see in the storage market in the next 12 months?

I'm forecasting some economic improvement. I believe we are slowly getting out of this, but I think it's going to be a long recovery. So the milestones for me will continue to be all the metrics of emerging stronger; are we able to maintain our capacity, can we deliver reasonable revenue and most importantly are we innovating new products and gaining market share? And if we're doing those things, we're going to emerge stronger.

You're at the helm of a software company in an incredibly difficult market. How hard is that?

What's changed is the reward system. You can no longer look at massive growth, and say I'm growing at 80 per cent, I must be doing a good job. All you can look at is positioning the company to be highly successful when we have a good economy. All bad economies eventually end, and you can't save your way out of an economic downturn, you have to spend your way out of it.

What I measure myself on is stock and on a relative basis, we've done pretty well. I measure myself on revenue growth and margins and we've done well there as well. Are we positioned for the good economy when it comes back? I think we are.

You spent many years at Oracle and most recently worked as Larry Ellison's right-hand-man. What was that like?

There's a public and a private persona of Larry, and they're quite different. It's interesting because a lot of people ask me to give the dirt on Larry, and it's very difficult for me to do that. I worked at Oracle for over 14 years, my career was built there, and the skills that I developed and I operate and use today, are the skills I learned from Larry. Some I learned on my own from trial by fire, and some I learned from him. But the combination has delivered me a very successful career and he was a key player behind that successful career.