IBM's Acquisition May Create Big Blues
Over the last few years, many of the major vendors in traditional backup software and storage solutions have strayed from their well-established roots. Iron Mountain, Seagate, EMC and Symantec have all jumped into the online backup managed service pool mostly via acquisition. IBM even made a splash last week as the latest vendor to announce an acquisition of an online backup managed service provider (MSP).
But what does this mean for end users facing solution decisions going forward? In the past it was just a question of what tape media, tape drive and offsite records management provider to use. Now the choices are tape, disk or managed services. To address these issues, I caught up with AmeriVault's Director of Marketing, Scott Bush, to discuss this industry trend and what challenges that end users face.
First, Scott raised some questions where potential conflicts of interest may arise when a publicly-traded enterprise with a traditional in-house solution acquires an online backup service provider.
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What will happen when you integrate sales efforts?·
Are you going to receive the best solution or whatever will please shareholders the most?·
Will technical support jump through hoops or have to conform to a process that handles tens-of-thousands of customers?·
Will the new regime embrace the superior technology and still provide the number of personal touches that made the service great in the first place?Second, in this consolidation climate, Scott feels AmeriVault's position is ideal. It maintains a highly-secure and redundant infrastructure and then adopts best-of-breed software to deliver the latest advances available such as
continuous backup and deduplication. Being very deep and narrow in online data protection assures AmeriVault stays focused on customer needs and the number of touches needed to optimize service and facilitate disaster recoveries.Scott adds that competing with these larger, public enterprises doesn't change the rules. You still have to fully fix the problem, be credible and offer a competitive price. Then it all comes down to service, where AmeriVault feels it has the edge.
Overall, though, Scott sees the IBM acquisition as a positive for AmeriVault. Seeing the traditional storage providers add managed, online service to their portfolio raises the visibility and awareness of online backup among customers and gives AmeriVault's business model more credibility. He feels this is the final validation that online backup is a best practice and threat to traditional in-house solutions.
To further differentiate but remain true to data protection, AmeriVault continues to wrap complementary services around its online backup service including
RestartIT-VDR, an economical, remote recovery solution and AmeriVault-DV, a lifecycle and archiving service that handles older, less-accessed data. These offerings coupled with its highly available infrastructure and its continued independence should give AmeriVault advantages that allow them to compete with other companies who are buying their way into the business.
Good article ...
But, one thing I have not able to find is where the sector is heading, say 5 years from now and what market value of the industry is now and what it will be in, say, 5 years. Could you please post this kind of study?
Thanks
Peter
Peter,
DCIG Inc does not currently have such a study available for publication.
Jerome