Veritas Technologies on Tuesday went on the offensive against a wide range of storage competitors, from EMC to SimpliVity, saying those vendors stand in the way of the kind of digital transformation that customers need -- and some are already undertaking.
Veritas executives told customer and channel partner attendees at this week's Veritas Vision conference that the Mountain View, Calif.-based company is the only company that can help with that transition given that it is the only software-only storage vendor with the enterprise experience to do so.
The comments came after Veritas unveiled a new information platform it said would make it easy for customers to protect and manage their data with full compliance with company policies.
[Related: First Veritas Vision Confab Since 2004 Highlights New Info Management Platform, Red Hat Partnership]
Veritas executives were especially critical of Dell and EMC. Indeed, Veritas on Tuesday took out a full-page advertisement in the Wall Street Journal (see photo) with the headline, "There's a special place in Dell reserved for hardware."
Mike Palmer, Veritas' senior vice president and general manager of solutions for data insight and orchestration, said during his Veritas Vision keynote address Tuesday that companies like EMC and Dell used their market clout to sell a lot of storage hardware, but then realized they needed to move to software to meet future needs.
EMC realized it couldn't "sustain this over the long term. … So they bought a software company, VMware," he said.
Palmer said customers have rejected EMC's VMware vCloud cloud technology, and then -- in a particularly harsh analogy -- compared EMC to notorious convicted Los Angeles drug trafficker and current T-shirt retailer "Freeway" Rick Ross. "This is a guy that knew more about product lock-in than anyone. … He bought houses to store his cash," Palmer said.
EMC, like Rick Ross, suffered for its mistakes, Palmer said. "Rick Ross went to jail," he said. "Today, he sells T-shirts. EMC went to Hell, I mean to Dell."
Palmer also chided EMC for selling its Data Domain de-duplication storage hardware as a way to lock customers into EMC, saying that for customers it's like a 30-year-old kid living in the basement. "He's never moving out," he said.
One place where customers have been looking for a way to move beyond legacy storage technology is in hyper-converged infrastructure startups like San Jose, Calif.-based Nutanix and Westborough, Mass.-based SimpliVity, Palmer said.
