Veritas is a leader in storage management software and has eight development facilities around the world. The Indian facility accounts for 25 per cent of Veritas' worldwide engineering and is the only one that has counterpart engineering teams for every product group of Veritas Software, US.

Fred van den Bosch, executive vice-president, Veritas Software, US, said unlike other American companies who do only testing and support work in India, Veritas India is closely involved in critical product development for storage management software. He said the popularity of e-business worldwide implies a need for huge amount of storage and availability systems and this translates into accelerated growth potential for the company. The target for Veritas is to become a $2.5-billion company in five years for which it is aggressively expanding its business.

In India, Veritas has grown from a base of 55 employees in January 1999 to 200 people at present and has plans to grow to about 300 employees by next year. On Veritas software products, Bosch said they minimise operational downtime and ensure that applications remain available to users and business is carried out without interruption. Essential information is protected through high performance online backup and recovery ensuring continuous availability of data. Problems are also identified and rectified by the software before they become disasters and in case of failures it enables moving of processing to another system.