Veritas Software Corp is pushing all of the right buttons on storage management, backup and clustering, managing to outstrip third quarter expectations by a wide margin now it is also counting revenue from the acquisition of Seagate Software’s Network and Storage Management Group. It expects next quarter’s revenue to be up 9% sequentially over the third. It is fast becoming an infrastructure play in the eyes of Wall Street.
Veritas has a new lightweight, shrink-wrapped version of its network backup software in the pipe for the first quarter of next year call Business Backup. There’s new GeoCluster facility under development for automating remote data recovery, and the company will demonstrate its Magellan software for deploying Veritas applications in storage area networks at its user conference next week. Magellan is due to ship by mid next-year. It plans to add the ClusterX technology from its NuView acquisition as a front- end to its a high-availability and cluster server products.
The company says the level of technical integration with new OEM Hewlett-Packard Co and long-term partner Sun Microsystems Inc is at parity, although it will take a few releases of HP’s software for the company to catch up on the real deliverables. It also took Veritas two-and-a-half years to get the Sun relationship up to full speed in revenue terms. It expects the HP relationship will take the same amount of time to reach its full potential.
With 35 new OEM deals signed this year, the quarter’s OEM revenue was up 100% year on year. Veritas says Microsoft is going to run its Backup Executive software on 7,500 systems in its data center internally.
The company reported a third quarter net loss of $183.57m compared with a profit of $12.59m last time on revenue which rose 75% to $183.4m over $105.1m last time. The loss included a $1.1m acquisition charge and a hit of $234.9m for amortizing the way it records revenue from its Seagate Software’s Network and Storage Management Group from user license fees to service revenue and associated operating expenses. On a pro forma basis the company would have recorded a profit of $38.9m over $17.11m and earnings per share of $0.21 – four cents ahead of estimates. At the nine month mark the company reported a net loss of $332.3m compared with a profit of $30.18m including the same charges on revenue which rose 157% to $369.95m compared with $143.74m. Pro forma results would have shown a profit of $95.9m over $45.8m on revenue of $473.86m compared with $284m. Services were 14% of revenue in the quarter.
