Storage giant EMC today announced updates of two backup products, just days after it went on the attack, beginning a campaign — “Safe Switch” — to lure customers from its rival and the leader in the backup software market, Veritas.
EMC has released Legato NetWorker 7.2 and Dantz Retrospect 7 for Windows. NetWorker targets enterprises that have large data loads. EMC bought Dantz, which focuses on the small and medium-size business market, in October.
Trailing Veritas
One analyst said that EMC’s moves were needed to get the company into the public eye after recent announcements from its biggest rival.
“The Retrospect announcement is probably more significant in that it shows that EMC is really going to promote this offering, and it comes on the heels of Veritas’ Backup Exec 10.0 announcement a couple weeks ago,” Carolyn DiCenzo, vice president, Gartner Dataquest, told CRM Buyer. “EMC needs to get some visibility.” Backup Exec is a direct rival of Retrospect.
EMC said Retrospect 7 includes new wizards that make it easy for SMBs and companies with many outposts or laptop users to automate data protection for servers, desktops, and notebooks in heterogeneous environments. The update also expands backup-to-disk capabilities.
“Backup to disk will be significant in this market, especially with virtual tape software or appliances,” DiCenzo said.
NetWorker also offers enhanced backup-to-disk capabilities, easier use and expanded application integration, according to EMC.
Compatibility Key
DiCenzo believes the product’s most significant advance is compatibility with EMC’s Documentum content management software.
“The Documentum support is very interesting since it is the first backup product to provide application-specific backup for a content management product,” she said.
“Not only does it provide a hot backup but it also backs up all of the components of the application together. This is a proof point of the benefit that EMC will deliver by having both a protection and content management product in their portfolio. This shows they are moving beyond just offering more products, but to actually integrating them to providereal value.”
At the same time, DiCenzo said that the dual product announcement left EMC with significant challenges because of the very different customer bases the products are targeted to.
“The problem with this announcement is that EMC needs to clearly segment the markets that it is going to target with its two products,” she said. “This is a very difficult task and one that few vendors have ever been successful with.”
Veritas has managed to cater to both enterprises and SMBs with different products, but DiCenzo said that company’s case is the exception. “Their two products had sizable bases and defined channels when Veritas acquired the Backup Exec product,” she said.
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