Matt Vitale, VP Sales, Worldwide Data Protection, Quest Software, talked to Prashant L Rao about the vendor’s technology and product roadmap, the role of the Cloud in backup and recovery and more
What’s your strategy for the backup & recovery category?
Quest is investing pretty significantly in backup. We did a bunch of application-specific acquisitions. Eventually, we realized that we had all the peripheral pieces but no core backup & recovery capability. We did buy Vizioncore, which remains the premiere VMware/virtualized environment data protection tool. It’s number one in the market with over 40,000 customers. Most recently there was the BakBone Software acquisition. Now we have the ability to cover the physical, virtual and Cloud environments.
Roughly 19% of our turnover is reinvested into R&D. We are working on taking all of the components into a complete data protection product line. It’s a big market—roughly $5 bn worldwide. As per Gartner, in the next two years, 30% of all existing customers will change their backup & recovery or data protection solution. There’s a lot of change and significant data growth of better than 40% per year on an average. There’s huge complexity on account of the dynamics of the virtualization market. Cost, capability and complexity are the deciding factors here and one of these three will make customers switch vendors in the next couple of years.
From a technology standpoint, what can we expect from Quest?
The next generation of our backup technology is called NetVault XA. It will be generally available in the fourth quarter. If you look at today’s data protection market, everybody’s following pretty much the same approach of looking at systems and which ones to backup and when. NetVault XA will be compliant with ITIL. We are moving from protecting IT systems and devices to protecting IT services. XA will look at the SLA that’s required from a system and maintain that. With that, we will have a new interface that will be common across all of our products. To start with, we will integrate vRanger (virtual system administration), NetVault (physical, heterogeneous backup) and SmartDisk (dedupe). The interface is a thin client style interface that will be enabled on iPads, smartphones, laptops etc. We are taking it away from where you have to be a PhD to administer backup & recovery. Whether you are a systems, database or Exchange admin, you can administer this system.
Is the Cloud relevant from a backup & recovery perspective?
If you look at the small business environment, the Cloud is a significant opportunity for them. Software-as-a-service as well as Cloud backup are the two options for them. This is for the smallest companies, as data growth is outpacing the network. Mid-sized or large customers will do better with on premise tools but, from a DR standpoint, they will go to the Cloud with some level of data retention. The key is the ability to restore data when you really need it.
Demand for forensic level recovery of apps is another trend. It used to be that you had to return a LUN or disk or a mailbox in Exchange. Now it’s down to the message or object level. We have the richest application support whether it’s SharePoint, Active Directory or Exchange. Exchange is a significant part of the market as is SharePoint depending on where you are in the world.
Are technologies like D2D and CDP catching on?
There’s definitely an increasing trend of backing up to disk. In North America the move away from tape to D2D and then to the Cloud has been quicker.
CDP is catching on. A few years back, 10-20% of the data was considered to be mission-critical. That’s 50% now. Customers are from the smartphone generation and they expect to get everything instantly. CDP is playing a bigger role in that. We offer the ability to restore data in as fast as 30 seconds.
Where is Quest placed today and where does it want to be in the data protection space going forward?
Gartner rated us sixth in the world market. If you look at the top companies it’s Symantec, IBM, EMC, HP and CommVault. We just moved up from the Other category in the most recent assessment. We feel pretty strongly that we will try and be No. 3 or 4 in the next three years.
Unifying the interface and the common services layer allows us to use modules like scheduler and catalog across the product line. We will continue to focus on virtualization as our first and foremost approach.
If you look at the competition, they are adding these capabilities to legacy products whereas we build a product from the ground up. The amount of business that we do in virtualized environments is approaching parity with that of physical.
It’s still early days for the Cloud. We have interfaces from our products into the Cloud through some partner relationships today but we will absolutely be expanding our focus on the Cloud probably most from the concept of on premise software to DR in the Cloud.
Our sales to end users are higher than those to service providers. We have customers as large as Yahoo! and RIM all the way down to SMBs. Percentage-wise it’s balanced between small and medium businesses today. The new XA architecture is going to allow us to play in larger enterprises more and more.
