Veritas Software
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| VERITAS Software logo | |
| Company type | Public |
|---|---|
| Industry | software industry |
| Founded | 1989 |
| Defunct | Became a part of Symantec in 2005 |
| Fate | Acquired by Symantec in 2005 |
| Successor | Symantec Corporation |
| Headquarters | Mountain View, California, USA |
Key people | Mark Leslie, CEO 1990 - 2000; Gary Bloom, CEO 2000 - 2005 |
| Products | VxSF (incl. VxFS and VxVM) NetBackup Backup Exec Cluster Server (VCS) Enterprise Administrator Volume Replicator (VVR) SANPoint |
| Revenue | $2.04 billion USD (2004) |
Number of employees | 7000 |
| Website | www |
Veritas Software Corporation is (Founder- Bhushan Meena) an international software company that was founded in 1983 as Tolerant Systems, renamed Veritas Software Corp. in 1989, and merged with Symantec in 2005. It was headquartered in Mountain View, California. The company specialized in storage management software including the first commercial journaling file system, VxFS, VxVM, VCS, the personal/small office backup software Backup Exec and the popular enterprise backup software NetBackup. Veritas Record Now was the first worldwide popular CD recording software, due to groundbreaking high reliability (a notable achievement at a time when CD writers were a new technology), an easy user interface, and support from hardware manufacturers. Veritas was listed on the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ-100 under the VRTS ticker symbol.
History
Origin
Tolerant Systems was a company founded in 1983 by Eli Alon and Dale Shipley (both from Intel) to build fault-tolerant computer systems based on the idea of "shoe-box" building blocks. The shoe box consisted of an OS processor, running a version of Unix called TX, and on which applications ran, and an I/O processor, running a Real Time Executive, developed by Tolerant, called RTE: both processors were 320xx processors. The system was marketed as the "Eternity Series."
The TX software gained a level of fault-tolerance through check-pointing technology. Applications needed to be fortified with this check-pointing to allow roll-back of the application on another processor if a hardware failure occurred. Tolerant also developed a forerunner of today's RAID systems by incorporating a journaling file system and multiple copies or N-plexing the disk drive content.
Dale Shipley formed Tolerant Software in Jan. 1988. Tolerant Software produced a journaling file system and a virtual disk management system for the AT&T UNIX platform, which was built by a new team lead by John Carmichael. In 1989, Mark Leslie joined the company as CEO and renamed the company as VERITAS in honor of Harvard, his alma mater.
Early History
- Initial Business Model: Veritas started out with unique relationship with AT&T to provide the file ( Veritas File Manager - VxFS) and disk management (Veritas Volume Manager - VxVM) software for its UNIX operating system, and to jointly market and support the products to the System OEMS (Sun, HP, etc.). The OEM model provided royalties to Veritas when the OEM shipped its products to end users.
- Public Offering: On December 9, 1993 the company had its initial public offering (IPO), selling 16 million shares to the public, and valuing the company at $64 million.
Accelerated Growth and Acquisitions
At the end of 1996 Veritas had revenues of $36 million.
- Tidalwave Technologies Acquisition: In 1995 the company acquired Tidalwave Technologies, a small San Francisco based company for $4.2M in stock. Tidalwave specialized in cross-platform High Availability (HA) Software and thus entered the HA business.
- OpenVision Acquisition: In 1997 the company acquired OpenVision Technologies, another public company of the same size, and thus entered the backup business. Although the company only retained $20 million of OpenVision's 1996 base, it completed the 1997 year at $120 million.
- Seagate NSMG Acquisition: The company achieved $200 million in 1998, and in 1999 acquired the backup business from Seagate Software, which was also approximately $200 million in 1998. In 1999 the combined company achieved revenues of $700 million, and became the undisputed leader in the Storage Management Software industry. In 2000 the company achieved revenues of $1.2 billion, was added to the S&P 500, became a Fortune 1000 company, and became the tenth largest software company in the world by revenues, and third largest by market capitalization.
- Internet Bubble: In 2001 the industry went through a major downturn as the internet bubble burst. Nonetheless the company was able to achieve revenue growth of 25% to $1.5 billion, and operating margins of 25%.
- Growth of 42X: Through this accelerated growth, Veritas went from a $36 million company to a $1.5 billion company, a growth multiple of 42X in five years.
Unique human resources policies
- Offices—Not Cubicles: In contrast with most high-technology companies, which put most workers in cubicles, and a few—notably Intel and Hewlett-Packard—who put all employees, from the CEO on down, in cubicles, Veritas had a policy of putting all engineers, technical writers, and other "creative" workers in offices with doors that could be closed to exclude outside conversations.[citation needed] Most such workers that lasted six months got offices with outside windows.[citation needed]
- No Secrets: In most Silicon-Valley companies, important decisions take a long time to filter down to most employees, even those who design the company's new products. Veritas had a more egalitarian approach: every employee was, by SEC definition, an "insider". Every week, there was a company meeting in the lunchroom, where the CEO, Mark Leslie, told all employees the company secrets, including quarterly results, annual results, upcoming products, experimental projects, and new contracts.[citation needed] The disadvantage of making all employees insiders is that every employee was a potential inside trader. For this reason, the SEC required five blackout periods when employees could not buy or sell Veritas stock: one month before each quarterly or annual report was issued. In 1995-96, Veritas was a very small company with fewer than 100 employees. Its small size made the secrecy policy possible. A few years later, Veritas had expanded 20-fold, so this policy became impossible to maintain.[citation needed]
Acquisitions
- April 1997 - Acquired OpenVision Technologies. This included NetBackup.
- May 1999 - Acquired the Network and Storage Management Group of Seagate Software. This included Backup Exec.
- August 2003 - Acquired Israel's Precise Software Solutions, one of the Application Performance Management (APM) leaders,[1] for about $400 million in cash and 7.4 million shares of its stock for a total of about $609 million.[2]
Merger with Symantec
On December 16, 2004, Veritas and Symantec announced their plans for a merger in a deal valued at $13.5 billion. It was the largest announced software industry merger to date.[citation needed] On June 24, 2005, Veritas and Symantec shareholders voted to approve the merger. On July 2, 2005, Symantec and Veritas finalized the merger and the resulting company has retained the name Symantec.
Split of Symantec
On October, 10th, 2014, Symantec announced the split of the company into two parts.[2] The security business will remain with Symantec. The Information Management business will be known as Veritas Technologies Corporation. Veritas Technologies Corporation will be its own publicly traded company which will not be associated with Symantec. The separation of the companies is expected to be completed by January 1, 2016.
Lawsuits
In 1999, VERITAS Software Corp. (VERITAS US) and VERITAS Ireland entered into a cost-sharing agreement(CSA)[3] [4]
See also
References
- ^ "Veritas Buys Pair of Software Firms". eWeek. 2002-12-19.
- ^ a b Boulton, Clint, "Veritas Closes Precise Software Purchase", InternetNews.com --June 30, 2003--, retrieved 2009-11-03 Cite error: The named reference "Boulton" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
- ^ http://fedtaxdevelopments.foxrothschild.com/2014/12/articles/federal-taxation-developments/why-has-the-irs-outsourced-microsofts-transfer-pricing-audit-of-microsoft-to-a-private-law-firm/?utm_source=Mondaq&utm_medium=syndication&utm_campaign=LinkedIn-integration
- ^ http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=17681094442401642589&q=Veritas+Software+Corp.+v.+Commissioner,&hl=en&as_sdt=6,48&as_vis=1
External links
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