Blogs

Like so many industry and vendor events so far in 2020 (and no doubt like many more for a good while yet), VMworld was presented digitally this year. That significant change did not however affect its scale, whether measured by ambition, breadth of coverage or likely impact.

Kaseya is hosting its Connect IT 2020 conference online this year, as could be expected, and just unveiled a number of new capabilities and integrations following an acquisition announcement yesterday of email security and phishing defense platform Graphus. 

In this new edition of Data Protection Conversations, I speak to Molly Presley, Founder of the Active Archive Alliance.

Execution.  On many fronts.

This is really what came to mind in the first few minutes of the Commvault FutureReady online event yesterday (7/21).

First, the event itself was excellent: length, content, delivery, use of customers, and it included primarily live sessions from what I could tell. The platform worked without a hitch. To net it out: as a participant, one benefited from both engaging content, and active engagement through the ability to interact with the speakers. Great job! Great execution.

I wrote some months ago that under Sanjay Mirchandani, Commvault was not just changing, it had already changed. Fast forward a few months and we now find ourselves in a totally different world. But one thing that hasn’t changed and stands out is the continued execution and focus of the Commvault team, even through these confusing times.

In this episode of Data Protection Conversations, I catch up with Justin Augat from iLand.

The recent research ESG conducted on the impact of COVID-19 on knowledge workers and on IT spending intentions revealed a few interesting findings that directly affect data protection. Backup and recovery is hot!  While some organizations are cutting their IT budgets, not every one is and some specific technologies are actually doing better than others. Among the top 3 technologies least likely to be reduced: cybersecurity, remote/telework solutions...and data protection! 26% of our IT executive respondents said their data protection budget is actually going increase, and 54% will keep it steady. Cloud technologies and services fare very well across the board as one could have guessed in the current climate.  

VeeamON used to have 2000 attendees. That was in the “old” world from a few months ago. The “new normal” has made the company pivot its popular event to digital, as is happening around the industry, with more or less success and execution prowess. 

Veeam nailed it.

One interesting thing happened: it “democratized” the event, making it available to 20 times more people than the physical event could. So out of a “bad” thing, a good thing happened. Veeam will also hold localized versions of this in various parts of the world in the next few weeks, like Europe. However, it was pretty clear that many did not want to wait and joined the event despite the time difference. 

The data protection space relies on a very diverse and complex ecosystem of channel players. How has the COVID-19 crisis affected the channel? I discuss this important topic in a new video with resident expert and lead of ESG's channel practice Kevin Rhone.

In this latest edition of Data Protection Conversations, I talk with Doug Matthews from Veritas.