Lindsey Armstrong

'The emerging markets are a major focus for us in the next 12 to 24 months,' says Lindsey Armstrong, regional senior vice president for the world's eight largest software company by sales. 'We have had a tremendous experience with the DIC which has created a genuine IT hub in a very short time. There has been a real return on investment for Veritas'.

A law graduate from Newcastle, Ms. Armstrong has been with Veritas for the past five years, and has played a major role in positioning the company for its present growth in this region. She was previously in a senior sales position in Oracle, which remains the biggest partner of Veritas in the Middle East.

'What we provide is the software between say an Oracle application and a piece of hardware,' she explains. 'Storage software is vital to support mission critical data as well as core business applications'.

Ms. Armstrong adds that this does not necessarily mean planning for disasters like earthquakes. 'It is equally important to maintain and back-up email, if that is vital to your business,' she says.

'System failure is not just a cost to your business there is the loss of brand reputation to consider. If your website fails to deliver then people will just switch to another and you may have lost them forever'.

She cites the implementation at Bank Al Saudi Al Fransi as a good example of a successful implementation, with bank training upfront and a real stress on skills transfer. 'One size does not fit all, and we work with clients in a flexible way to achieve their objectives.'

However, Veritas certainly is able to handle major disasters. Last year the tragic events of September 11th proved to be the software house's greatest ever challenge. No less than 130 clients lost all their data and hardware, and sadly in many cases their staff as well. But Veritas still managed to recover all this data, for all 130 clients by drafting in staff from around the United States.

'We are enhancing our partner programme in the Middle East and can now configure and install Veritas software more effectively than ever,' says Ms. Armstrong. 'And we are also unveiling our new adaptive software architecture for the first time in the Middle East at the Gitex computer show. This reduces storage complexity across an enterprise and supports high data growth of up to 50-200% per year'.

With the need for reliability and recovery of data now increasingly seen as vital to winning and retaining clients, Veritas looks set for further dramatic growth in the Middle East as its own brand becomes a household name in this region.