Network World Senior Editor Deni Connor met with Mark Bregman, executive vice president of product operations at Veritas, to discuss how the company views storage and how it competes with other vendors in the market.

What is Veritas' vision for storage for the next year, three years - and how does it fit with the storage industry vision?

The next year is clear - it gets foggier the further out you look. A trend has been taking place for some time that is coming to center stage for most of our customers - that is network storage.

There has been a lot of promise over the last several years driven by the desire to get increased data and application availability. Now, with the economic situation and focus on the bottom line, storage networking is being looked to as a way to get better utilization without buying more gear. It is also being driven by cost pressures - the hope that by having all storage on a network, you can manage it more efficiently and have fewer people dealing with it.

Those people who tried to implement advanced storage networks in the last 12 to 18 months saw that the reality didn't live up to the promise, so they could get better utilization out of the hardware and reduce their hardware costs, but instead traded it for higher management and people costs.

The realization has come about that storage networks are pretty compelling on paper but are pretty complicated, and interoperability issues continue to appear. Finally, the tools to manage, report and support the distribution of storage over the network and do charge-back are not in place yet.

There's a huge opportunity for us to help customers cut through the complexity of storage and solve interoperability issues, because as a software vendor, we're platform- and device-neutral.

You say network storage is coming to fruition even though there are issues of interoperability and management. Is that what you are saying Veritas is going to be doing in the next year - solving those problems?

We are already. We just announced the release of our storage resource management product, SANpoint Control, which brings all these network storage elements together - it supports NAS as well as direct-attached storage, and provides what we call active SRM. SRM has been focused on reporting, but we go beyond that in allowing users to take control and manage their storage resources, not just inspect them. So it's not just a microscope, but a surgical instrument. As things become more complex, just having inspection tools and not the tools to manage them isn't going to be sufficient.