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John: Hi, everybody. This is John McKnight from ESG headquarters in Boston. I'm speaking today with Christophe Bertrand, across country in San Francisco, who is our senior analyst covering data protection.

And Christophe and I today are going to be chatting a little bit about what he sees in the market, for 2020 trends related to data protection. So, good afternoon, Christophe. How are you?

Christophe: Hi, John. How are you doing?

John: Good, thank you.

Christophe: Good.

John: Well, why don't we jump right into it? So, what are you seeing in terms of major trends shaping up for the data protection market in 2020?

Christophe: As I see it, what I see is that change from traditional backup and recovery to, of course, more cloud, but also a shift to what I call intelligent data management. And it's really about the ability to reuse data for other purposes than just backup and recovery. You've got all of this data, it's dormant, it's not being used for anything, and, by the way, it could also be an exposure from a compliance standpoint if you don't know what you have.

So, being smart about that data so that you can present it to other parts of the organization to reuse it, treat it as an asset is really what I think is about to happen. As a matter of fact, I know that because we have research on it.

John: Excellent. Now, you talked about exposure, and you and I have had a lot of conversations around companies being exposed to various forms of risk as they adopt more SaaS applications. So, talk a little bit about what you see in terms of trends and protecting SaaS resident data?

Christophe: Right. So, SaaS is a very interesting animal in the sense that end-users believe, or for whatever reason, that they actually have backup and recovery included in some cases. And that's not the case, there's a confusion or a conflation of high availability or availability of the service with the actual protection of the data.

So, I expect that we're going to see a lot more around SaaS backup and recovery. It is not necessarily happening as much as it should today. I think there are many exposures for organizations that now use SaaS as a mission-critical application, and they're going to need high availability and disaster recovery solutions around those applications across the board. We're not there yet, lots of work to happen next year.

John: Now, what do you see in terms of those solutions coming from traditional data protection vendors, some of those incumbent vendors versus new entrants that are coming along to solve those problems maybe even specifically for a certain SaaS application or workload?

Christophe: Absolutely. We're seeing that already. There are some specific vendors or very focused vendors on one application or another. I think for 365, for example, most traditional backup vendors will actually have something that really works nicely for end-users. There's going to be less and less maybe differentiation because it's a very well-understood problem.

But I think other applications such as Salesforce, for example, which is a mission-critical application, that's where I expect to see a lot more competition, a lot more interest. There are some solutions today that do really well, but I think there'll be more. In addition, there are other SaaS applications out there that literally run your business. And that's what we're going to be looking into as well in 2020.

John: Excellent. I know you were recently at Dreamforce covering that market and obviously, Salesforce and the protection of that data which is critical for pretty much every enterprise these days. So, I would encourage viewers to check out Christophe's coverage of that event and Salesforce data protection in general. So, speaking of events, you recently came back from AWS re:Invent with the rest of the ESG analyst contingent. What can you talk about in terms of trends related to cloud, cloud infrastructure, cloud protection going forward?

Christophe: One of the things that I'm seeing is the fact that end-users are now asking for multi-cloud environments. So, therefore, the ability to support capabilities across a variety of hyperscalers is what is expected. The other thing I'm seeing is also costs. It's great to have data in the cloud, but when you think about disaster recovery or running even some advanced capabilities around data protection, well, that may cost you compute, that may cost you egress cost depending on what you're doing.

So, I believe there will be some reshuffling of the cost structure because end-users just can't afford some of the things they're doing, and they just realize, sometimes at the wrong time, that they've had the meter on all the time, and it's expensive. So, costs will change, multi-cloud. And I also expect hyperscalers themselves to provide more in terms of APIs and capabilities to better protect those applications that are resident on their platform.

John: Sure. Well, I think if there was anything that crystallized in 2019 in the industry is that everyone is really coming to terms with and acknowledging that for the foreseeable future we will be in both a hybrid and multi-cloud world. So, to your point, now it's about how do we operationalize that, and how do we take care of compliance, data governance, data management issues that reflects that in reality.

Christophe: Exactly. And I would like to encourage people to take a look at the 2020 prediction brief for data protection. And if you have any questions, I'm easy to reach.