Twitter War Voyeur

Social media platforms such as Twitter provide a platform to educate, collaborate, evangelize, and engage ... and (best of all) fight. And that's what I've been witnessing over the last few months between two of my favorite virtualization backup vendors, Veeam and Quest. It's been a bit of a catfight unfolding blow by blow-in real time on Twitter.

Serving a niche server virtualization audience has been good for Veeam. The company has been posting impressive metrics:

"Total bookings revenue grew 119 percent in Q2 of 2011 over the same period in 2010, and new license bookings revenue increased 114 percent over that same period. Year to date in 2011 total bookings revenue grew 125 percent over the same period in 2010, and new license bookings revenue increased 118 percent over that same period." (excerpt from July 19, 2011 press release)

Quest Software acquired Vizioncore in early 2008 and although Quest has had a bad quarter or two lately, it's not necessarily reflective of the success from the former Vizioncore vRanger solution. Today, Quest announced it surpassed 40,000 virtualization customers with vRanger (38,000) and NetVault Backup (2,000) (part of the BakBone acquisition).

The attacks on Twitter are starting to resemble diva wars ... claws and all. Rarr! In the movie 27 Dresses (okay, I know, it's a chick flick) the best friend character says to the heroine: "What you did was unleash twenty years of repressed feelings in one night. It was entertaining, don't get me wrong, but if it was the right thing to do you'd feel better now. Do you feel better right now?"

Can I be the best friend character from 27 Dresses and tell two of my heroes at Quest and Veeam the same thing? Do you feel better unleashing hostility at each other?

There's a bigger picture you're losing sight of: winning market share for a mainstream customer, that is, one with both virtual and physical system backup needs. Yes, the virtualization market is growing. However, as organizations progress beyond virtualizing IT-owned applications, the requirements for backup/recovery change. There will be an increases in the scale of the virtualization environment. SLAs must be negotiated with LOB customers. There will be demands for high-value features, including application-specific support (beyond Microsoft applications) and tape media support (yes, tape is still very much a component of backup processes for many companies) as well as the ability to manage backup of virtual and physical systems from a single interface and policy engine. Quest's acquisition of BakBone brings a wealth these features to the vRanger doorstep, although it will take time before we'll see them implemented.

Competing for a niche market and bickering between each other about who is doing it better is not time well spent. Focus on the overall war rather than simply the battle.

All the mainstream backup solutions have "caught up" (you can thank VMware and their vStorage APIs for Data Protection for leveling the playing field). Performing optimized backup/recovery of virtualized environments is more commonplace.

Having fewer backup solutions in place is desired. That means the incumbent backup vendor that can protect physical and virtual environments has the edge-overwhelmingly. They are in place and now keeping pace with requirements. The split physical-virtual environment could be like that for a while given that ESG research indicates that nearly two-thirds of large midmarket and enterprise organizations have virtualized 40% or fewer of all potential x86 servers that could be virtualized. In addition, over three-fourths (77%) of survey respondents would prefer a single backup application for physical and virtual environments.

So, Quest and Veeam, lay off the Twitter and get busy!

Read more of Lauren's blog entries at Data Protection Perspectives.