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At the end of his keynote speech at the Veritas Vision users' conference in April 2005, John Thompson, the CEO of security software supplier Symantec was congratulated by a customer on his company's acquisition of Veritas, the world's leading storage management software company. "Can you say that louder," pleaded Thompson, "so that Wall Street can hear?"

But even if every Veritas customer in the huge conference hall had shouted the roof down - and according to Veritas executives they are so delighted that is how they feel - Wall Street is not listening. For three exhausting months, both Thompson, and Gary Bloom, the CEO of Veritas, have been attempting to explain and justify the merger. They have talked vision, integration roadmaps, product plans and Symantec has even promised a $3 billion share buyback.

All to no avail. Since Symantec announced the Veritas deal, some $6 billion has been wiped off the combined values of the two companies. The fall in value means that the agreed $13.5 billion takeover is now worth only $9.4 billion, less than the $11.5 billion takeover of PeopleSoft by Oracle.

The merger gave the annual Vision conference in San Francisco extra significance: It was not only the last under the Veritas name, but the first chance for Symantec to talk to 3,000 Veritas customers and partners about the rationale for the merger and vision for the new company.

There are two parts to that vision. The first part relates to supplier stability: both Thompson and Bloom think that size is necessary to survive and thrive in the software industry, and that further consolidation is inevitable. Their plan: to create a software company big enough to stand on its own (combined revenues in 2005 are expected to be around $4.9 billion), independent of the hardware and operating system companies.

The second part - the more visionary element but the also the more controversial - is all about 'information integrity', the convergence of availability and security. Veritas and Symantec executives argue that anti-virus and other security products, provided primarily by Symantec, and back-up and storage management products, provided by Veritas, are natural complements that, together, can provide one seamless, secure infrastructure. "Information that is secure but not available is useless...and information that is available but not secure is of no use to you," says Thompson.

This vision, Bloom accepts, is not yet accepted by all his customers. But, he says, "Our job is to have the vision and knowledge of where the industry and the technology is going. This is absolute convergence [of security and availability]. But we are at an early stage."

In interviews, both Bloom and Thompson have presented a choreographed vision in which networks and systems not only almost never go down, but anticipate problems (such as viruses) before they occur; in which information, efficiently managed and stored across heterogeneous systems, is always available, wherever it is stored; and where information is never lost, but is always easily recovered with minimum intervention from technical experts. All of that will eventually happen within one set of products.

But that will take time. In the first six months after the merger, products will merely be made interoperable, with some bundling. After that, products will begin to share a common interfaces and common technologies - as though they come from one company. Some new products will incorporate technologies from both sides: compliance, for example. In the third stage, there will be new ideas and products.

Meanwhile, Veritas is planning a powerful set of new products in support of its unified vision. These included a new version of its back-up product, NetBackup 6.0, which enables administrators to manage back-ups through a portal style interface and users to easily find them using a Google-style search tool. It will also release a new version of its archiving product, Enterprise Vault, which effectively catalogues and backs up emails and their attachments.

Veritas also described two new products: BigHorn, which enables administrators to manage and rationalise copies of files across a distributed and storage area networks; and "Panther", which continuously saves and backs up changes made at the application level. This will eventually enable users to recovery files and processes at the exact point where an interruption occurred - a first step towards the vision of what Veritas and Symantec are now calling the "resilient infrastructure".