Disaster recovery seminar April 16

Name: Anthony DeCicco

Age: 47

Position: Vice President Professional Services, VERITAS Software Corporation

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Education: Bachelor’s degree from Montclair State University in New Jersey; Master’s from Montclair State.

Residence: New Jersey

Based in the Silicon Valley, VERITAS Software Corporation provides storage management software for data protection, application availability and disaster recovery. The company has more than 5,600 employees in 33 countries and annualized revenues of $1.5 billion in 2001. It is the eighth largest computer software company in the world.

DECICCO: Just about anybody can be our customer. One of the things that VERITAS is well known for is our ability to back up data and to make data available. Our customer list runs the gambit. From small companies to Fortune 500 companies. In the local area, we work with Textron, Stanley Bostitch, Taco Manufacturing, CVS, Cranston Print Works…We’re in the manufacturing sector, the financial services sector, the telecommunication sector, the technology sector…just about anybody.

Do industry sectors have widely different needs?

The sectors have a lot of the same needs. Irrespective of whether you are in telecommunications or financial services, or retail – a lot of the needs are the same. That is, protecting the data – the corporate asset. Moving data around the enterprise is really what has become mission critical. For example, e-mail is now a mission critical application. If people don’t get their e-mail, they go crazy. They can’t get their job done. I would not have said that five years ago. It would not have been a mission critical application. At every corporation, small, medium and large… data becomes the way they get their business done. Our job is to make sure that data moves throughout the enterprise – and that they store that data and they save that data in such a way that it can be retained when necessary.

You talk a lot about saving data, but also about the wide range of industry sectors you serve. How about and old line manufacturing company – what kind of data might they want to save?

Anything they can possibly think of to store. Everybody has customer records. Billing, human resource records…any of the records that you would find at any company. We also have products that work from the desktop to just about the mainframe. One of the things that is interesting about today’s world is that a lot of the corporate data resides away from the central computer. I have a ton of data on my laptop — and we back up our laptops. A lot of companies don’t do that. So there is a lot of data that goes unprotected. There is a good likelihood that some of the corporate intellectual property goes unprotected.

What are the most common challenges that your clients are looking for you to solve?

That’s easy. Managing risk for customers. When you are talking about technology and bringing technology into an enterprise, most CIOs have a lot of different software companies and hardware vendors – and a lot of different pieces of equipment in their environment. That’s a big management of risk job.

What are examples of risk?

You have to think about all of the types of things that a CIO might be under pressure for. Security is a big one. So is disaster recovery. Just back up and recovery of data. Integration of all of the technology in the data center. To be more specific…we have HP technology, we have Sun technology, we have IBM technology. All of these technologies have to work together in the data center. They’re sort of separate and apart…but if I’m a CIO I have to make them all work together. Your internal customers really don’t care how you are playing with these technologies. They just want to have their applications available to them. That’s what you have to do for the CIO. You have to get his or her applications constantly available.

One of the things that we did, as a result of the disasters was that we did put together a SWAT team to service companies in the New York and Washington, D.C. areas. We spent about two months restoring information. You know, backup is not really what we’re about. What we’re about is recovering data. Backup is easy. Recovery is hard. The folks that suffered tragedy that day…they needed to get data back. You can’t get 90 percent of data back because that doesn’t make sense. It’s not meaningful unless you get all of the data back. We recovered about 32 terabytes of data for our customers …we got back 100 percent of the data. That was a testimony, not only to our products, but also to our people.

You were the executive in charge of this SWAT team that was put together. What exactly did you do in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks?

The first thing we did that day was a head count. Is everybody okay? Once we got by that, we did an inventory of who had what skill set because we knew almost instantaneously after we did our head count that our customers would need out help. So we put together our SWAT team. I got about 300 volunteers from the company who wanted to fly there the next day.

Do you believe companies now are more aware of the importance of backing up and protecting their data?

The amount of awareness since Sept. 11 is incredible. We have been running disaster recovery seminars since November and we get at least 100 people at every one of them – and sometimes we get up to 300. The awareness level is quite high…much higher than it was before.

VERITAS is a public company. For many public companies — particularly those that are technologically driven — it has been a rough couple of years. How has VERITAS weathered the recession?

It’s been a rough go for a lot of technology companies, but I think VERITAS is in a nice space within the industry. We have products and services that are essential for business continuity. Our products help business continues under almost any circumstance you can imagine.

So do you define VERITAS as a technology company?

I do define us as a technology company. But we are in a space that everybody needs. Data is something that any corporation, no matter what size, can not live without. Helping to manage data is something that is going to happen in good times and in bad times. n