Veritas is between a rock and hard place. Based on my interview with Gary Bloom, the company's CEO, that's exactly where the company belongs.

The rock is the IT community. Despite increasing evidence from a handful of IT vendors that moving to a more homogeneous environment will net significant economies of scale, IT shops continue to stay very heterogeneous in their technology selections. Veritas' storage-driven reliability and availability solutions can work with any servers, any storage, and any applications. To the extent that it is the Switzerland of clustering solutions, Veritas thrives on heterogeneity. But, with the number of IT vendors shrinking, homogeneity is becoming not only more tempting, but more difficult to avoid.

The hard place is utility computing. Bloom defines a utility as something that performs very well, delivers a high level of availability, and runs off a shared, automated infrastructure (automated failover, provisioning, backup, etc.). To the extent that utility computing can be likened to a water or electric utility -- a metaphor that Bloom draws upon -- Veritas has been providing the infrastructure needed to run reliable computing utilities since it was founded in 1989. (It wasn't until recently that "utility computing" became the fashionable term to describe what Veritas does.) But now that companies like HP, IBM, Microsoft, and Sun see the same market opportunities in reliability, performance, and infrastructure automation that Veritas may have seen years ago, they're coming out with their own one-stop utility solutions that not only include hardware, but that compete with Veritas products.

But Bloom says homogeneity is an impossible dream. "If you're the CIO," said Bloom, "Even if you wanted to be 100 percent homogeneous to a single hardware vendor, the chances of successfully doing that are slim unless your company is doing absolutely no merger or acquisition." Bloom claims to often hear companies insist that no degree of merger or acquisition activity can weaken their commitment to a single vendor-- only to get a call from one of those companies weeks or months later with news that some M&A has finally forced them to look for Switzerland.

As far as Bloom is concerned, his competition -- IBM, HP, Sun, EMC -- can't provide that Switzerland, and never will, no matter what they say about their neutrality. "Everybody else that's going after the utility market," said Bloom, "has some bigger agenda. If you're Oracle, your agenda is all data and all information in Oracle, and 10g isn't going to do anything for the customer that also has SQL Server and DB2. If you're IBM, you're not going to do anything that makes your customers more successful at running Sun processors. If you're HP, you're not going to do anything to help IBM sell more IBM processors. If you're EMC, you're not going to do anything that helps IBM sell more Shark disk arrays."

Claiming it has no hardware agenda (or software agenda, for that matter), Veritas has delivered a series of solutions that, along with their user interfaces and management consoles, work independently of the supported platforms. Suppose that the data that requires 5-9's availability lives in both the Oracle database and the file system hosted by your Linux servers. (Your JSP, PHP, Perl, or other scripting code that's stored in the file system is "data" that's as important, from a failover point of view, as the database itself.) Oracle's clustering won't do you nearly as much good as something that can cluster it all. Go ahead and replace "Linux" in that last sentence with Unix or Windows. On Veritas' solutions, it all works the same.

"I don't think the typical customer wants an Oracle utility for their Oracle environment and an IBM for their DB2 environment, and a Microsoft utility for their SQL Server environment," Bloom told me. "Nor do I think, on the hardware side, that customers want an EMC utility to run their EMC environment and a Hitachi utility to run their Hitachi environment. I think what customers want is a common utility model that works in a heterogeneous world." That's a lot of "I thinks" and no "I knows."

But, so far, Bloom's instincts for what IT shops want appear to be paying off., Although the company's market capitalization took a beating this week after it announced it would be missing its earnings mark, I believe this is but a bump in the company's road to more success. With penetration of its solutions into 99 percent of the Fortune 1000 and $2.5 billion in cash reserves, Veritas' "no agenda" agenda seems to be working. Said Bloom, "Our technology runs under a dramatic number of general ledgers. The vast majority of ledgers and HR applications in the world run on Veritas solutions."

So, where does Veritas go from here?

The next logical extension to the company's clustering solutions and file systems is automated provisioning. Another extension is performance management. Here, with its acquisitions of companies like Ejasent and Jareva, Veritas has been rounding out its utility portfolio. It's no wonder that availability, performance, and automated infrastructure add up to Bloom's definition of "utility."

When it came to other natural extensions of his business, Bloom and I traded barbs on whether document management (a fancy word for "searchability") should be a part of the infrastructure. Bloom called it an ERP application and said it should remain the domain of document management specialists. I'm not so sure. Microsoft, with its forthcoming file system (known as WinFS), seems to think that document management belongs in the infrastructure and should be accessible by applications through APIs. Veritas nemesis and storage giant EMC seems to believe differently as well, having recently acquired Documentum.

Bloom was resolute that document management has no place in the infrastructure. But, given the unified file system that Veritas can stretch across heterogeneous or homogeneous enterprises (WinFS is a long way off, by all accounts), who could better weave the management of unstructured data into the infrastructure than Veritas? Every day that goes by with Veritas keeping its paws off unstructured data is a good day for EMC, if you ask me.

Perhaps the better question is: How much longer can this pure play stand alone?

Though Veritas continues to make acquisitions, the utility computing market is looked upon-- by companies like IBM, HP, Sun, Oracle, and Microsoft -- as the gold at the end of the rainbow. Veritas, if not for its technology, than for its customer list, could be a utility market goldmine for any company with a war chest big enough to swallow it. But even on that point, Bloom remains defiant. "From a strategy perspective, there's nothing that says that Veritas can't lead the utility market on a standalone basis." Bloom argued that between Veritas' cash reserves and its "no agenda" agenda, the company would be a bitter pill to swallow. (He cited Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle as three companies with the resources, but not the will).

One good match, however, might be another industry Switzerland -- Computer Associates, especially if it can get its house in order. Between CA's systems management portfolio and Veritas' utility portfolio, the whole could easily end up being greater than the sum of its parts.

You can write to me at david.berlind@cnet.com. If you're looking for my commentaries on other IT topics, check the archives.