Bloom is not resting on Veritas' laurels, though. The company is actively moving to try to parlay its dominant market positions onto even higher ground. For example, Veritas has ported its storage management product suite to IBM AIX. Now Veritas software runs on every major operating system, including Solaris, HP-UX, Linux and Windows. As partial payback for AIX, Pars Larsen, IBM vice president for worldwide eServer Solutions, sponsored the big social event of the conference - the B-52's concert...

Next, Veritas cut a deal with Cisco system to "engage in joint delivery of next-generation storage network solutions." Veritas was tight-lipped about details, but it's a safe bet that Veritas code will find a home in some of Cicso's future networking gear and, if Bloom has his way, eventually in other vendors' products as well. Of course, embedding storage management deeply into the network promises a higher level of quality of storage services. It's a big win for both companies.

Finally, Veritas announced that it will be ratcheting up its support for independent hardware and software vendors by providing tools, development assistance, qualification services and cooperative customer support agreements to help them integrate their products into the Veritas family of products. Veritas will develop Open Storage Plug-ins that support proprietary vendor APIs, as well as industry standard APIs. "These tools," says Robert Soderbery, who manages storage and networking partnerships at Veritas, "will shorten the time it takes to move new hardware and applications into production."

Needless to say, all of these announcements should keep Bloom smiling.