Data management vendor Veritas has laid down a challenge to all-comers, by promising to bring in a totally autonomous system for managing enterprise data through the channel by 2026.
It is dedicated to introduce such a system in partnership with cloud service providers and managed service providers. It claims its rivals have “not even thought about” introducing a similar system, to help customers cope with the “data deluge” across clouds, the edge and on-premise.
On the first day of this week’s IT Press Tour across Silicon Valley and Denver - which IT Europa is attending – Veritas senior vice president for data protection product management, Doug Matthews, outlined the company’s “strategic vision” to take out rivals in a very fragmented data backup and recovery market.
The Veritas vision is as follows: “We believe data management and protection should just happen, invisibly and autonomously – but without sacrificing human oversight.
“We will eliminate the burden of human intervention from data management.”
Matthews said that while some rivals, such as Commvault, have chosen to roll-out wider cloud and as-a-service offerings through launching new products, Veritas will instead bolster its established NetBackup – currently on version 10 – to take partners and customers on a “shared journey” to autonomous on-demand data protection.
He maintains that rolling out completely new products in this area is “cumbersome” for partners and enterprises to adopt, and risks increasing costs over and above established product lines.
He also stressed the difference between “automated” and autonomous offerings. He said: “Automated systems rely on pre-defined parameters that have to be constantly changed by customers, which is burdensome for many.
“Our strategy will avoid this through automated cyber resilience, multi-cloud optimisation and intelligent protection. We will do this by 2026.”
By the time we get to this date, promises the company, it will be generating over 80% of its sales from recurring revenue, tapping into new consumption models.
The data backup and recovery market is a crowded one, and arguably always has been. Veritas is up against the likes of Commvault, Dell EMC, IBM, Veeam, Cohesity, Rubrik, Acronis, Druva and others.
Veritas reckons the current economic uncertainties may well see “three or four” players “struggle”, and sees its plan as part of protecting its position in the market.
On the IT Press Tour, it trumpeted data from analyst house Gartner which apparently shows that Veritas is the number one vendor globally in the enterprise data backup and recovery market, with a 15% share.
Incidentally, Veeam, at its VeeamON customer and partner event in Las Vegas last month, claimed the same thing. It cited a report from analyst IDC which put it on 12%, having won market share from the likes of Dell EMC.
More coverage from the IT Press Tour will follow.
