The former senior executive at Oracle - the database software leader located at Redwood City, California - is now running his own company, a leading provider of software to manage data storage systems.

To some extent, Mr Bloom was fairly familiar with Veritas because Oracle embeds Veritas software in its applications. Oracle is best-known for its core database software, while Veritas's products ensure data availability - so the territory is familiar in many ways.

Mr Bloom joined Veritas late last year and is getting to know the company, but he says it is a good fit, especially in cultural terms. By that he refers less to Oracle's overall company culture - typified by billionaire chief executive Larry Ellison and his taste for publicity and controversy - and more to the collaborative management process that Mr Bloom prefers.

Veritas, based in Mountain View, California, is growing quickly, while Oracle is more mature and its growth is not quite as explosive. But the lessons Mr Bloom learned during his 14 years at Oracle during periods of rapid growth can be applied to Veritas, he says. For example, Mr Bloom notes there are huge overseas opportunities for Veritas, an area where Oracle has forged ahead and built substantial businesses, and where Veritas has barely scratched the surface.

Specifically, the new chief executive and president of Veritas believes the company can profit in Japan and in Europe, where there is a large pent-up demand for storage systems management. And he also believes that Veritas is largely immune from any potential slowdown in IT expenditures because data storage is not a discretionary item that can be put off without possibly harming the business.

Viewpoint

From his new vantage point, Mr Bloom has a good view of the trends and the strategies of many large companies. These range from eBay, the leader in online auctions to more established companies such as Sprint PCS, the wireless communications company.

On the issue of a slowdown in IT spending by large corporations, Mr Bloom sees it in a different way. "My view is not so much that IT spending is slowing, but that it is shifting to different areas. With e-business projects, companies are having to manage massive amounts of data in order to support their activities," he says.

This means a shift away from spending by dotcoms, which have experienced a serious downturn in their business, and in general investment on the PC and the mainframe, in favour of enterprise-wide Unix systems.

IT managers are also trying to reduce the number of suppliers they deal with to a handful of larger vendors that have the staying power to remain in business over the long term, Mr Bloom explains.

"Companies are increasingly reluctant to do business with vendors that might not be around for very long. Companies such as Veritas have shown that they have stability and the ability to provide a range of vital IT infrastructure products," says Mr Bloom.

He notes that some companies are struggling with software and systems from vendors that "are no longer there" and they will not repeat the same mistakes. He predicts that the larger IT vendors will gain revenues from this reluctance to take a chance with smaller companies that face long-term challenges.

From his background at Oracle and now as head of Veritas, Mr Bloom naturally sees the IT world through the ever-growing volumes of data that corporations have to manage, back up, protect and use to support their business, growth strategies, and sharpen their competitive edge.

"Companies are daily asking themselves how do we leverage the data we have, how to make that data more available, and fundamentally, how much data can we afford to lose?" he says.

Data has always been the lifeblood of a business but it has to be processed, managed and interpreted into useful information. Companies are continually assessing how they value their business data and how to use it, not just to reduce operating costs but also for competitive gains.

To do that, their data must be managed and delivered efficiently. For a company such as Veritas, eBay makes for a very good customer since it deals with huge amounts of data related to its online auctions.

"Ebay uses IT in a way that pushes the envelope and stresses all parts of the IT infrastructure. By working closely with Ebay, it tests our software in the most rigorous environments and allows us to develop software that is reliable and has high performance," Mr Bloom says.

While few companies have quite the same requirements as eBay, greater numbers of companies are overhauling their IT systems to deal with the growing demands of e-business and the stresses on their IT infrastructure.

Storage of data has become a major headache for IT managers, and so is the backup and protection of that data. Security of data is another concern, and Mr Bloom says there has been significant progress in the IT data security area despite some high profile incidents of hacking into company systems. For example, Egghead.com, the US-based direct marketing site for technology products, recently said that hackers tried to steal credit card numbers from its customer database.

Corporations, Mr Bloom notes, have been successful in plugging a lot of security holes in their IT systems, and although the Egghead incident continued to highlight the need for more work, "the overall situation could be considerably worse."

The US IT market is still ahead of other countries, says Mr Bloom. He points to Asia, specifically south Korea and Japan, as a region that is lagging behind in terms of data storage systems management.

Another trend is that companies want solutions that are compatible with their heterogeneous IT infrastructure. While Veritas faces competition from companies such as Sun Microsystems, EMC and others, he points out that Veritas is "hardware agnostic" and supports many different platforms.

"Customers don't want to buy data storage management solutions from say, Sun, that only work with Sun systems," he says. They want IT solutions that work across a range of hardware, operating systems and applications. Veritas accomplishes this by offering software components that are part of the operating system and applications used by customers.

Customers are also seeking out large IT vendors as strategic partners to work with them on upgrading IT infrastructure and expansion projects.

Linux, the free, open source operating system, has made quite a splash in the IT world over the past year and has grown faster than Mr Bloom expected. But he does not yet see Linux as important in the enterprise space although Veritas will be ready to support Linux once it does gain more ground.

Over the next few years, the ability to manage the huge volumes of data from e-business will be the challenge for IT managers. And for Veritas, that's very welcome news.