DR as a Service from Sanovi

The vendor believes that a BFSI-focused approach is critical for it to address the $100mn DR/BCP opportunity in the country. By Heena Jhingan

In a bid to further strengthen its foothold in the Disaster Recovery solutions space, DR Management (DRM) Software provider, Sanovi Technologies, has introduced an offering, specifically designed for the banks. Considering that BFSI is the second largest investor in IT solutions, Sanovi has a strategic plan for this segment.

There’s growing demand for DR solutions in this sector in light of RBI policy guidelines—based on the Gopalakrishna Committee report that mandates that banks operating in India test their Business Continuity Plan/IT DR of critical applications regularly in order to ensure that they are up to date and effective. The RBI also recommends that banks consider having unplanned DR drills.

According to the company’s co-Founder and Vice President of Products, Lakshman Narayanaswamy, Sanovi’s latest offering complements its existing DRM Suite and it will help banks automate their Business Continuity and Disaster Preparedness as well as to comply with regulations and guidelines laid down by the RBI.

Reporting as mandated by the regulator requires specialized tools. “Typically every bank has certain critical applications such as core banking, Internet banking and Real Time Gross Settlement Systems (RTGS), which if they go down in the event of an outage or manual errors, can result in huge losses to the bank’s business.”

DR solutions are critical to assure IT application availability to Indian banks as there is no certainty that more recent events like the power grid failure that impacted 22 Indian states will not be repeated.

In order to comply with the guideline, the banks have to submit a quarterly statement reporting major failure of critical systems and customer segment and/or service impacted by it.

Narayanaswamy reasoned that this would imply filtering, on an average, ten applications, four times a year. 40 reports a year, mostly generated on weekends with no tools to generate reports would lead banks to suffer in terms of time, resources and money.

“Our RBI-specific reporting module offers ready-made reports on the banks’ BCP test status, DR readiness capability, DR data integrity etc besides other standard reports on RPO and RTO. It also has the ability to recover at the application level or component level, enabling banks to test recovery capabilities of the complete application or at the component level. It is designed to capture and automate DR steps in such a manner that banks can test and recover their critical operations. They can also monitor recovery metrics such as RPO and RTO for critical applications using the solution,” he explained.

Eying new accounts
Sanovi said that it was working with most large banks in India. “For the existing users, wherever the support contract includes an upgrade clause, they can migrate to the newer version of our DRM solution for banks. We are engaged with a lot of these banks directly and we also work with large SIs like Infosys, Wipro and HCL. We also have on board several partners, who specifically work with the banking vertical,” said Narayanan Menon, Lead- Marketing, APAC & Middle East of Sanovi technologies.

The company plans to extend the offering to other geographies such as the Middle East and the rest of APAC market where the banks have similar kinds of reporting challenges. The solution could be customized to address their challenges as well.

Potential upside
Forrester’s Q2 2010 IT budget survey found that 32% of enterprises had planned to increase spending on Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) by at least 5% in 2011. A similar trend of increased investments on DR/BCP solutions was expected to continue through 2012.

Menon pointed out that, as per ABI Research, the global DR/BCP market is pegged at $39.6 bn by 2015 (including hardware, software and services component). Assuming that the DRM Software Market is worth about 10% of the services market (estimated at $12 bn), Sanovi’s addressable market worldwide would work out to $1.2 bn, which would mean that its addressable market in India would be around $100 mn.

Although the potential upside is tremendous, the company faces stiff competition from players like VMware and Symantec.

“We do compete with these players from the product perspective but we differentiate ourselves, in the sense that we take care of the DR management through its entire lifecycle. The likes of VMware have a limitation that they work in a virtual environment, while we work across physical, virtual and Cloud environments. We also have a Cloud-specific offering where we have partnered with players like Netmagic to offer DR management as a part of their DR as a Service offering. Our approach is to look at the DR Management lifecycle in its totality,” said Menon adding that the vendor have solutions across verticals including manufacturing and government. However, the release of bank-focused solutions is strategic, in view of the urgency of the requirement and potential addressable market.