Data Management & Analytics

MSP Partner Landscape 2020

January 15, 2021

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Enterprise Strategy Group

ESG’s Master Survey Results provide the complete output of syndicated research surveys in graphical format. In addition to the data, these documents provide background information on the survey, including respondent profiles at an individual and organizational level. It is important to note that these documents do not contain analysis of the data.

This Master Survey Results presentation focuses on 2020 MSP landscape best practices and actions; standout vendor offerings, programs, and support; and differences between small and larger partners.

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Data Protection Predictions for 2021

January 11, 2021

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Christophe Bertrand

No one could have predicted the COVID-19 pandemic and the profound impact it has had on our lives, our society, the way we now work, how we market our products, and the ripple effects on IT infrastructure and data in general. This once-in-a-lifetime event is placing data protection at the top of many lists, something that our research highlighted in 2020 and, looking ahead to 2021, will directly affect IT strategies against a backdrop of accelerated digital transformation/optimization.

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For more information or to discuss these findings with an analyst, please contact us.
Data Protection Trends and Strategies for Containers

December 30, 2020

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Christophe Bertrand

Container adoption is accelerating and so too is the requirement to properly protect container environments and the data in them. ESG research indicates that, so far, IT professionals are kicking the can down the road. While many recognize the growing importance of containers relative to other vital application platforms, confidence levels in organizations’ ability to protect containerized workloads are lagging. As was the case with other recent disruptive shifts in the IT landscape, including the VMware and cloud computing phenomena, newer data protection approaches are needed.

In order to gain insight into these trends, ESG surveyed 334 IT professionals at organizations in North America (US and Canada) personally responsible for or familiar with their organization’s container-based application environment and strategy, including the associated data protection tools and processes.

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Data Protection Considerations for Containers

December 21, 2020

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Christophe Bertrand

ESG conducted a comprehensive online survey of IT professionals from private- and public-sector organizations in North America (United States and Canada) between June 12, 2020 and June 24, 2020. To qualify for this survey, respondents were required to be IT professionals responsible for/familiar with their organization’s container-based application environment strategy.

This Master Survey Results presentation focuses on understanding the current state of end-users’ application and container deployments, identifying data management gaps, and determining current practices and potential disconnects that may exist when protecting Kubernetes/ containers infrastructure at scale.

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Get Ready for the Hybrid Cloud Data Warehousing Surge

December 14, 2020

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Mike Leone

Data warehouse modernization has become an essential move to meet the demands of the modern business. And it is easy to get lost in the hype when it comes to modernizing with a “cloud-first” or “cloud-only” approach. Organizations are drawn to the promise of ultra-simplicity, unlimited scale, improved agility, and ubiquitous accessibility. But for some organizations that are on this path, they are starting to see the tradeoffs they have made. One of those tradeoffs comes with price/performance. Not that modern cloud data warehouses do not perform well, but if you want the low-latency performance to truly support real-time, you will either have to pay for it (especially at scale as more end-users want access to the data) or minimize your ability to truly achieve real-time responsiveness. And it is forcing organizations to rethink their cloud data warehouse strategies. Maybe an on-premises data warehouse does have a place? And so does a cloud data warehouse?

While several traditional on-premises data warehouses now have cloud services to enable hybrid cloud data warehousing, many still leverage their vintage architectures that were designed around a rigid on-premises pipeline process derived long before the hybrid cloud technologies of today existed. Release after release has resulted in improved capabilities, but at the expense of trading off functionality for added complexity, and with less-than-ideal levels of performance, cost, and agility.

One of the vendors I have been watching emerge in this modern, hybrid cloud data warehouse space is Yellowbrick. This is a company that natively designed its data warehouse for hybrid cloud, promising the best of both on-prem and cloud data warehousing worlds. Customers get the high performance and concurrency of specialized on-premises systems, while also gaining the agility, scalability, and simplicity of cloud-only solutions. Yellowbrick can be consumed as a service anywhere with the same data and performance everywhere—either on-premises/in a private cloud, through any public cloud, or a combination of both. And here’s the kicker: organizations don’t have to make a trade-off of performance or cost. ESG recently completed an economic study of Yellowbrick Data Warehouse to quantify the low and predictable cost savings through their fixed-cost annual subscription.

Hybrid cloud data warehousing will be critical going forward. Whether you are an organization looking to move traditional data warehousing workloads to the cloud or a company that started with a cloud data warehouse whose bills are starting to rise as performance demands increase, it may be worth evaluating (or re-evaluating) your options.
2021 Technology Spending Intentions Survey

December 1, 2020

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Enterprise Strategy Group

This Master Survey Results presentation focuses on 2021 IT budget expectations, technology initiatives and priorities, year over year spending change (overall and by different technologies), cloud adoption/usage trends, as well as an update on the status of COVID-19 driven work from home initiatives and efforts.

ESG’s Master Survey Results provide the complete output of syndicated research surveys in graphical format. In addition to the data, these documents provide background information on the survey, including respondent profiles at an individual and organizational level. It is important to note that these documents do not contain analysis of the data.

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Keep an Eye on IBM Cloud

November 17, 2020

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Christophe Bertrand

I recently had the opportunity to spend some time with the IBM Cloud team on a couple of projects and met with some great professionals with significant expertise in disaster recovery and data protection in general. The IBM Cloud team leverages a number of partners in its ecosystem and IBM services. As the title of this short post indicates, keep an eye on IBM Cloud, as they have built and are working on furthering a great platform for BC/DR.

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HYCU Does It Again

October 27, 2020

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Christophe Bertrand

I wonder when people sleep at HYCU! I have been tracking the company for 2.5 years, and it’s been innovating and introducing new solutions at a very nice clip, demonstrating focused execution.

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Real-world SLAs and Availability Requirements

October 26, 2020

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Christophe Bertrand

Data protection technologies and processes mean nothing unless objectives are not only established and aligned with business and IT objectives, but also measured and improved over time. As organizations increasingly shift to more hybrid and data-intelligent infrastructures, understanding real-world data protection and availability SLAs is becoming more critical for both IT practitioners and the vendors that provide supporting technology.

In order to gain insight into these trends, ESG surveyed 378 IT professionals at organizations in North America (US and Canada) personally responsible for or involved in data protection technology and process decisions for their organizations, specifically those pertaining to the ability to meet SLAs associated with applications/workloads. This research aimed to understand the current state of end-users’ deployments, identify gaps, and highlight future expectations. Tolerance for downtime, downtime metrics, and real-world SLAs in the context of actual data loss were studied against the backdrop of availability technologies and methods, including hybrid environments.

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Happy Birthday Metallic!

October 14, 2020

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Christophe Bertrand
It’s hard to believe that almost exactly a year ago, on October 14, 2019, Commvault launched Metallic, which is now an award-winning solution. As a product guy, I know from experience how difficult but rewarding it is to get an award at VMworld for your solution. A one-year old solution with a best in show is very impressive. Well done Metallic team! More importantly: well executed!

The stakes are high in this vendor space with intense competition (including in the SaaS backup/DR segment) as end-users accelerate their digital transformation and rely on data even more than before. Not to mention the ransomware attacks intensification. The present and future of BC/DR are “cloudy” and, based on our research, we expect to see organizations continuing to adopt data protection as a service moving forward, and an evolution toward intelligent data management and data reuse. These are very favorable trends.

Let’s look at the execution side of the equation: the addition of Manoj Nair a few months ago as GM built on the original momentum culminating in the recent partnership announcement with Azure, based on a long-standing relationship between Commvault and Microsoft. This is where strategy meets execution, with a meaningful partnership based on years of “dancing” together. It’s something that I firmly believe will in time differentiate this offering from others where everyone dances with everyone.

Let me summarize some highlights of one quick year. Metallic launched October 14^th 2019. Since then:
- Strategic MSFT Partnership announced.
- Azure Marketplace launch (Office 365).
- Feature expansion: Hyper V Support.
- Manoj Nair becomes GM.
- Metallic offers free endpoint offer to help with the shift to a remote workforce.
- CAD Expansion.
- Metallic partners with Zones (Office 365 Backup and Recovery).
- Feature expansion: Azure Blob & File Support.
- Azure Marketplace Launch (Endpoint).
- New eDiscovery and GDPR compliance features + support for more Microsoft workloads.
- Awards: SaaS Awards finalist; IT World Awards Winner.
- ANZ Expansion.
- Feature expansion: Commvault Command Center Integration.
- Awards: Gold Stevies Winner.
I may have missed some milestones, but you get the idea.

I wrote in other blogs how Commvault has been transforming at a rapid pace, with the acquisition of Hedvig being a move that positioned Commvault ahead of the race in the containers space, many features additions, and of course Metallic, which was designed to be a cloud solution from inception. Both the Hedvig and Metallic moves were what I call “pragmatically visionary.” They were big strategic and market differentiating decisions focused on an informed belief of future market directions (containers, SaaS), and (of course!) they could also be monetized reasonably quickly with the right level of execution and investment. Which takes us to today.

The Metallic offering is now at what seems like a very desirable inflection point and prime for accelerated growth. It’s making Commvault as a whole more competitive and will clearly get in the way of newer SaaS-focused vendors. One year is a long time in the SaaS space. Let’s take a look at where Metallic is one year from now. In the meantime: Happy Birthday!
Things to Think About on the Day of Snowflake’s IPO

September 16, 2020

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Mike Leone

The day has finally arrived. Today, Snowflake will IPO under the ticker SNOW. Many knew this was coming, even before Frank Slootman was brought in as CEO. But I don’t think it was expected to have as much fanfare as we’re seeing. Buffet (Berkshire Hathaway) is on board. Benioff (Salesforce) is on board. It’s being called the hottest tech IPO of the year. So, what’s the draw? Is it the differentiable technology? Not really. The number of customers? Nope. Customer growth? Impressive, but no. What about the total market size? Getting there. What about the value propositions it offers customers? Well yes, but I would argue there are several competitors that offer similar value propositions. So, what is it? The opportunity. The opportunity is simply massive.

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Kaseya’s Connect IT Full Of Goodies

August 25, 2020

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Christophe Bertrand

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.

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