VRTS Juggernaut......Veritas: R&D at $4 billion over 5 years
By Michael Baron, CBS.MarketWatch.com
Last Update: 5:29 PM ET May 17, 2001
NEW YORK (CBS.MW) -- Veritas Software CFO Ken Lonchar said the company plans to spend $4 billion on research and development over the next five years.
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Responding to a question from the audience at the Salomon Smith Barney Data Storage Infrastructure conference, Lonchar said that while it hasn't scaled back spending, the company (VRTS: news, msgs, alerts) has shifted the focus of investments from one strategic area to another.
For example, Veritas is increasing spending on the storage area network environment rather than the Linux operating system platform. In addition, Veritas is working on technologies for inclusion in the next version of IBM's (IBM: news, msgs, alerts) OS platform.
When asked which of the company's products are seeing the strongest growth prospects, Lonchar mentioned replication products, an area that he noted was one of the only places where Veritas competed with EMC (EMC: news, msgs, alerts) . "I haven't been on a sales call in the last six months, where the customer didn't ask about replication," he said.
Replication products allow data backup, for copying to secondary servers or to prevent losses in a disaster.
Commenting on the current economic environment, Lonchar said the slowdown would have to end sooner or later and that companies can't save their way out of it. Instead, he said, they would have to determine where to invest in order to emerge stronger.
Shares of Veritas traded up $1.19 at $69.20 on Wednesday.
Michael Baron is a reporter for CBS.MarketWatch.com based in New York.
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