In SEC statements there is truth, eventually. Veritas yesterday made good on its promise to restate past financial statements, as a result of an investigation of its accounting practices. The company charged itself with incorrectly booking professional services revenue and expenses in some periods. The restatement is Veritas' second recent foray into SEC filing revision in as many years. Last year, Veritas removed $20m in revenue from its 2000 and 2001 books as a result of dealing between it and AOL.

Away from the fray, Veritas also released a revamped version of its NetBackup product, but more on that later.

For the year ended December 31, 2003, Veritas has now reported revenue of $1.75bn - a a decrease of $24m. Net income, however, actually increased to $347m from the $274m reported before. Excluding a Seagate tax settlement, net income would have dropped by $22m. For the year ended December 31 2002, Veritas has now reported revenue of $1.51bn - a decrease of $1m. Net income for that year has risen to $58m from $57m. And for 2001, Vertias has cited $1.499bn in revenue - a decrease of $3m. The net loss for the year is lower at $636m from $642m.

On the product front, Veritas released Version 5.1 of its NetBackup software, which includes a few performance boosts and better support for other vendors' products. In the release, work Veritas and Network Appliance have done comes to fruition. The Advanced Client version of NetBackup can now tap into NetApp's Snapshot and SnapRestore technology.

"Our software has supported other snapshot technology, EMC for example, in the past," said Glenn Groshans, director of product marketing at Veritas. "It's really just an extension of that technology to NetApp."

The Advanced Client software can also take snapshots of DB2, SQL and Exchange data, as it has done for Oracle in the past. Last and probably least on the support track, Veritas announced that NetBackup will now run on Intel's 64-bit Itanium 2 processor if the customer uses Windows, HP-UX or Linux. Veritas has also stepped up its encryption technology, moving past 4-bit and 56-bit. NetBackup 5.1 provides up to 256-bit encryption. ®

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