Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions 2019

 

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Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions

Published 10 October 2019 - ID G00380806 - 54 min read

By Analysts Santhosh Rao, Chandra Mukhyala, Nik Simpson

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The data center backup and recovery market is rapidly changing as it addresses I&O leaders’ needs for simpler, more agile and cost-optimized solutions. This research provides analyses of execution and vision of leading backup and recovery vendors and solutions.

Strategic Planning Assumption

By 2022, 40% of organizations will replace their backup applications from what they deployed at the beginning of 2018.

Market Definition/Description

The data center backup and recovery solutions Magic Quadrant focuses on vendors that deliver backup and recovery solutions to protect enterprise data center workloads. This research lists the criteria that vendors must satisfy to be included in the Magic Quadrant.

Gartner defines data center backup and recovery solutions as products that are designed to:

• Capture a point-in-time copy (backup) of data across heterogeneous enterprise workloads.
• Write the data out to a secondary device, such as tape, hard-disk drives, solid-state drives, an optical device, and/or to cloud services. The secondary device needs to be independent from the primary device.
• Provide the ability to find and restore specific datasets to the original or alternate system.

As the backup and recovery market is continuously changing, we simplified the market definition. Because this Magic Quadrant focuses on upper-midmarket and large-enterprise organizations, we refined the inclusion/exclusion criteria by increasing focus on international presence and size of the protected environment.

Note: One of the requirements of this Magic Quadrant was that all products and capabilities evaluated had to be generally available in the market by 31 January 2019. The full evaluation of vendors was completed in May 2019, and thus the “as of” date in the graphic reflects this.

Magic Quadrant

Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions

Source: Gartner (October 2019)

Vendor Strengths and Cautions

Acronis

Company information: Acronis is a privately held company, founded in 2003 in Singapore, with dual headquarters in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, and Singapore, and 30 offices in the U.S., Europe and Asia. It develops backup, anti-malware, disaster recovery (DR), storage and enterprise file synchronization and sharing solutions (EFSS), with a focus on cybersecurity, protection and recovery. Acronis delivers backup/recovery for on-premises and hosted data center environments, workstations and end-user devices, as well as public clouds.

Product description and enhancements: Acronis delivers a suite of products on the same codebase, with Acronis Backup as the core product for the data center; Acronis Cyber Cloud for service providers; and Acronis Cyber Infrastructure, which can be used as a backup target. Acronis Backup protects cloud-based data, data center workloads, remote offices and endpoints like workstations with a single product. Acronis’ backup solutions are integrated with security for the protection of backups and primary data, and Acronis agents protect against malware, as well as offering blockchain-based service for data authenticity certification and validation.

Acronis has delivered several improvements to its backup product including increased scalability, expanded support for multiple hypervisors and virtual machine (VM) image conversion.

Delivery model: Acronis delivers Acronis Backup as a software solution for on-premises deployment, or hybrid cloud deployment with management server or storage hosted by Acronis or its service provider partners. Acronis Backup comes in both a standard and enterprise edition.

Pricing model: Acronis offers its software with a variety of pricing options. Customers can choose between capacity-based, per-CPU or per-VM licensing in either a perpetual or subscription-based model.

Popular use cases: Acronis Backup customers range from small to midsize data centers with a focus on the automotive, sports, entertainment services, and oil and gas industry. Customers select Acronis for its simplified approach, instant recovery, image-based backup capability, enhanced security features and low total cost of ownership (TCO). Its client-driven architecture makes it a good fit for edge deployments and highly distributed environments.

Support: Acronis delivers worldwide support, with a focus on local support available in multiple local languages. Customer reference checks indicate that overall the customer support experience is good.

Strengths

• The Acronis Backup solution is a value-priced solution that has a specific focus on security and can address various use cases for backup and recovery of cloud-based data, remote offices, endpoints, and data center workloads with instant restore capabilities.
• Large enterprises in manufacturing and retail with highly distributed environments can use Acronis in an edge-to-cloud architecture without the need for a local appliance in each location.
• Acronis backup products and documentation are localized in 25 languages, thus providing a compelling and consistent user experience across multiple countries and regions.

Cautions

• Acronis does not integrate with VM snapshot capabilities provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, and it only supports agent-based backup for Windows and Linux environments.
• Acronis has slight differences in capabilities between its backup as a service (BaaS) offerings and its data center product, particularly for SaaS backup for G Suite, impacting customers using only the data center product with lesser functionality.
• Acronis has no support for in-memory databases such as SAP HANA and limited support for modern NoSQL databases such MongoDB and Cassandra.

Actifio

Company information: Actifio is a privately held company, founded in 2009, with headquarters in Waltham, Massachusetts. Actifio delivers copy data management software — independent of hardware — as a foundation for creating virtual copies of data that can be leveraged for backup and recovery, and as a strategic asset for driving business initiatives, which the vendor markets as Data as a Service (DaaS).

Product description and enhancements: The core of Actifio’s solution is its Virtual Data Pipeline (VDP) technology, which runs as a virtual appliance in the data center or in the cloud. VDP creates virtual copies of application data for physical machines, virtual machines, cloud-based data or cloud apps using agentless or agent-assisted technology supported for many platforms and enterprise applications. Copies are updated using incremental-forever technology and support direct hot mount for fast recovery. In addition, Actifio delivers a separate DR orchestration tool.

Actifio delivered the following enhancements to its product:

• Support for Google Cloud
• Additional storage support for VMware Cloud on AWS by supporting AWS object storage while keeping “live mount” capabilities
• Cloud mobility supporting data and hypervisor migration between VMware, Azure, AWS and Google Cloud

Delivery model: Actifio software comes as a virtual appliance — called Actifio Sky — or as preintegrated appliance called Actifio CDX, which is the virtual appliance preinstalled on a dual-node, high availability (HA)-designed Dell PowerEdge Server. Actifio Sky is available in Azure, AWS and Google Cloud marketplaces.

Pricing model: The pricing model is entirely front-end-capacity-based. Incremental capacity steps are per 5TB. Actifio Global Manager (AGM), Resiliency Director (RD), and Object Recovery for Exchange and SharePoint licensing are in addition to the base capacity licensing. Actifio supports both perpetual and subscription-based licenses.

Popular use cases: While Actifio supports a diverse environment, the most popular use case is for supporting database backups, either physical or virtual. Actifio’s DR capabilities are also important to clients.

Support: Actifio delivers worldwide standard or premium phone-based support. Both support options are 24/7 with respective one-hour or four-hour response time.

Strengths

• Actifio’s technology is particularly effective for protection and recovery of large enterprise-class databases.
• Actifio extended its product line to enable hybrid cloud backup, cloud data mobility, DR replication and orchestration, and to support backup of cloud-native workloads in multiple clouds.
• Customers report high levels of satisfaction with regard to ease of use, recovery times and product support.

Cautions

• Gartner clients indicate having challenges enabling the product with nondefault configurations of databases.
• Actifio Sky lacks traditional backup capabilities such as tape support and bare-metal recovery for operating systems.
• Despite being a decade old and having a competitive product portfolio, Actifio remains a relatively small organization with limited mind share in the enterprise, as it continues to rely on partners and service providers.

Arcserve

Company information: Arcserve is a privately held company with headquarters in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. Arcserve was first established in 1983. It was part of CA Technologies between 1996 and 2014, but has been a private company since then. Arcserve has been serving the data protection market for more than three decades and has a broad portfolio of products to protect data both on-premises and in the cloud, with customers across all regions and a large presence in Japan.

Product description and enhancements: Arcserve’s backup portfolio includes Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP); Arcserve Replication and High Availability for continuous data protection; Arcserve Backup for tape support; and Arcserve UDP Cloud Direct and UDP Cloud Hybrid for cloud-based backup, off-site retention and DR.

Arcserve also offers appliances to deliver both backup and disaster recovery using Arcserve UDP, Arcserve Backup and optional Arcserve Replication and High Availability. Appliances come in several capacities, with effective capacity from 12TB to 504TB on a single appliance, and scale to clouds, including Arcserve Cloud, Azure and AWS. Appliances include a certain amount of flash to support global deduplication.

Arcserve added the following enhancements to its products:

• Support for cloud-native BaaS/disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS)
• Support for Office 365 — Exchange and SharePoint
• NFS and CIFS share backup
• Virtual Standby and Instant Virtual Machine (IVM) to Amazon AWS and Azure
• Recovery of an SQL database to any point in time
• Cluster Shared Volumes File System (CSVFS) support for Microsoft SQL Server Failover Cluster Instance

Delivery model: Arcserve offers multiple delivery options including a software-only offering that can run on any Windows server; a fully integrated appliance; and “as a service” for both backup and disaster recovery.

Pricing model: Arcserve UDP software is a perpetual license and can be licensed per CPU socket, per OS instance or per TB, and it comes in five packaging options. Maintenance is a subscription-based service add-on for all perpetual licenses. The first year of software maintenance for UDP is not included in base licenses and must be purchased separately.

All appliances come with UDP Advanced or Premium edition software and no additional licenses are needed.

Popular use cases: Arcserve is preferred by midsize enterprises that need a storage-efficient solution to protect physical servers running traditional applications and virtual machines. Arcserve appliances make it easy for enterprises with limited IT staff to deploy and manage backup, DR, replication and deduplication with software or with an all-in-one appliance that can also tier to the cloud for the long term or provide DR in the cloud.

Support: Arcserve offers technical support to customers with an active maintenance subscription agreement. Maintenance for appliances may be purchased in one-, three- or five-year increments for gold support (next-business-day on-site support) or platinum support (four-hour on-site support). Arcserve UDP Cloud Hybrid comes in annual subscription licensing with two primary components: storage in 1TB increments, and RAM for running VMs during DR, available in 4GB increments.

Strengths

• Arcserve offers broad platform support, including physical and virtualized Microsoft and Linux-based environments supporting Microsoft-oriented workloads like SQL, Exchange, SharePoint and Active Directory.
• Arcserve customers can choose from a broad range of private or public cloud object storage targets to tier or backup data.
• Arcserve UDP has comprehensive support for Microsoft Azure, AWS and Azure Stack backup/recovery use cases.

Cautions

• Arcserve UDP does not integrate with snapshot capabilities of leading public cloud providers such as AWS and Microsoft Azure.
• Gartner inquiries indicate that Arcserve has limited mind share in large enterprises.
• Arcserve UDP offers limited functionality for ransomware reporting and remediation.

Cohesity

Company information: Cohesity is a privately held company with headquarters in San Jose, California, focused on consolidation of secondary data with cloud integration. It released its first product in 2015 and has been rapidly growing in both number of customers and revenue since then.

Product description and enhancements: Cohesity’s product is an integrated offering that includes a backup application running on a scale-out file system. It employs a scale-out clusterlike design, which starts with minimum three nodes and scales in capacity and performance by adding nodes to the cluster. While it is an integrated offering, it requires separate licenses for backup software and storage software for the storage appliance. It also includes add-on licenses for cloud tiering, cloud DR and cloud archive.

Cohesity stores the backup data in application-native formats and exports file-based data over network-attached storage (NAS) protocols, which allows direct access to the backup data on the Cohesity appliance without having to restore the data. This ability to use the backup data directly from the backup appliance without having to restore opens new use cases that enable consolidation of secondary storage use cases.

New features introduced by Cohesity include:

• Backup of Office 365: Exchange Online
• Change block tracking for Isilon scale-out NAS
• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) reports
• Nutanix AOS 5.5 support

Delivery model: The Cohesity solution is delivered as software that powers hardware or virtual appliances. There are two main software products: DataPlatform, the scale-out storage software; and DataProtect, the software providing the backup services. Cohesity can also sell the hardware appliance and scale-out storage software without the backup software, to serve as a storage target for other backup applications or for non-backup-related use cases. Cohesity solutions include multiple add-ons beyond the storage and backup software, to provide advanced functionality including cloud tiering, cloud DR and cloud archive.

Pricing model: Cohesity’s pricing strategy is based on a fixed price for the appliance nodes and subscription-based pricing for the appliance software. The software subscription is based on the appliance capacity, where the minimum subscription term can be as little as one month. Software support is part of the subscription model, where hardware support is charged per year. Cloud tiering is based on capacity used on-premises or in the cloud. CloudSpin recovers VMs in the cloud based on a price per 25 VMs. Tape archiving and granular recovery of Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL and Microsoft SharePoint require additional charges as they’re using third-party products.

Popular use cases: The primary use case Cohesity serves is backup of standard enterprise applications and virtual machine infrastructures. But Cohesity also exports the backup data in native formats to enable additional use cases, including test and development, disaster recovery and analytics by serving data directly from its appliances.

Support: Cohesity offers 24/7 global support with one-hour response times, and up to five-year support contracts including a Platinum level that provides both a technical account manager and designated support engineer.

Strengths

• Cohesity offers an integrated appliance that linearly scales both backup performance and storage capacity along with cloud tiering, replication and DR capabilities.
• Instant mass restore features provide the ability to restore several virtual machines within a short period, thus significantly reducing recovery time objectives.
• Cohesity integrates with APIs and frameworks provided by VMware ESXi (formerly ESX), Nutanix AHV, Microsoft Hyper-V and Cisco HyperFlex, thus improving overall backup efficiency and reducing recovery time.

Cautions

• Cohesity has limited mind share in the geographical emerging markets as it continues to onboard partners in these regions.
• Support for granular recovery of Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint, and IBM iSeries backup and tape-out requires add-on third-party software and is charged separately.
• Cohesity does not support backup for databases hosted in VMware raw device mapping (RDM) logical unit numbers (LUNs), an architecture that is still prevalent in mission-critical database environments.

Commvault

Company information: Commvault is a publicly traded data protection and information management company with its headquarters located in Tinton Falls, New Jersey.

Product description and enhancements: Commvault Complete Backup and Recovery is a highly scalable backup and recovery platform based on a traditional three-tier architecture of agents, media servers and a management server. The product consolidates backup, recovery, archiving, DR, replication, cloud integration and cloud backup functionality into a single offering based on a single software stack.

Commvault made the following changes:

• Repackaged its portfolio into four product lines:
  • Commvault Complete Backup and Recovery, its core backup and recovery software product
  • Commvault Orchestrate, its automation platform
  • Commvault Activate, a new platform to deliver information insight
  • Commvault HyperScale Appliance and HyperScale Software for delivering a scale-out solution
• Added two new smaller HyperScale appliances
• Introduced Command Center, an HTML5 user interface that replaced the original Java-based interface
• Enhanced its capabilities for protecting Office 365
• Enhanced its support capabilities with machine learning

Delivery model: Commvault Complete Backup and Recovery is delivered either as software, as a scale-out appliance or as hyperscale software for third-party hardware.

Pricing model: Commvault dramatically changed its pricing model to ease quoting and to lower the price of backup. Customers select licensing based on front-end capacity, number of VMs, physical CPUs or instances being protected in either a subscription-based or traditional purchasing model.

Popular use cases: Commvault is often selected by enterprise customers that favor its strong data protection management functions, hardware snapshot management functions, and cloud integration and protection capabilities. Organizations also favor the integrated source or target-based deduplication capabilities, eliminating dedicated deduplication appliances.

Support: Commvault offers worldwide support and opened a new support center in India to support the local market. Support is calculated separately but is included with its subscription-based licensing. Most customers select 24/7 support coverage. Commvault offers a large-enterprise support community for knowledge sharing and a Slack channel for engaging customers for product enhancements.

Strengths

• Commvault Complete Backup and Recovery supports a broad range of operating systems, hypervisors, applications, databases, storage arrays, public cloud providers, and data management functions, and is the most comprehensive integrated product in the industry.
• Commvault continues to be an innovation leader and often responds to market needs earlier than competition with application support, flexible pricing models and use cases such as cloud data management.
• Gartner customer surveys indicate a high likelihood to recommend and repurchase a solution from Commvault.

Cautions

• Despite recent improvements in user interface and design, Gartner clients continue to report challenges associated with product complexity and setup configuration.
• Commvault has limited mind share in the upper midmarket, as customers in this segment prefer less sophisticated products.
• Commvault HyperScale Appliances are still relatively new and are an unproven alternative for competing with scale-out vendors in this space.

Dell EMC

Company information: With headquarters in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, the Dell EMC Data Protection Division is part of Dell Technologies’ Infrastructure Solutions Group. EMC was acquired by Dell in 2016, after which Dell decided to focus entirely on the EMC data protection portfolio and sold its Quest data protection portfolio.

Product description and enhancements: Dell EMC’s backup product portfolio mainly consists of Data Protection Suite (DPS), which consists of nine different point solutions, and its Integrated Data Protection Appliance (IDPA) family.

Dell EMC announced:

• A new Integrated Data Protection Appliance (IDPA DP4400), which is a converged, integrated data protection appliance offering complete backup, deduplication, replication and recovery.
• Cloud Snapshot Manager, a SaaS offering that is used to protect AWS and Microsoft Azure instances.
• Dell EMC Cyber Recovery software that automates an end-to-end workflow to help customers with increased cyber resilience remediation through isolation and retention locking of protection copies, as well as full content inspection to find indicators of compromise.

Delivery model: Dell EMC Avamar and NetWorker, part of DPS, can be deployed as stand-alone products or in conjunction with Data Domain appliances. Both solutions protect on-premises physical and virtual environments as well as tier backup data to the public cloud. The IDPA comes as a fully integrated appliance combining backup software, deduplicated protection storage and management software. The physical configuration varies from a 2U single node to preconfigured racks, depending on the selected capacity.

Dell EMC Avamar, NetWorker and Data Domain are also available as virtual editions that can be installed in AWS and Microsoft Azure to protect applications in the cloud as well as to integrate with on-premises environments. The Cloud Snapshot Manager is offered via a SaaS model, and thus does not require additional software or hardware to be installed.

Pricing model: DPS is delivered as an Enterprise edition, Backup edition, VM edition, and Application and Archiving edition, all serving different use cases. Customers can either purchase DPS or consume it as a subscription-based model. Large enterprises often enter into a Transformational License Agreement that provides more flexibility. The Integrated Data Protection Appliance is available with a simple back-end capacity based pricing model.

Avamar, NetWorker and Data Domain are still available for individual purchase, but Dell EMC is focusing on selling the suite and/or the appliances. The NetWorker Virtual Edition, Avamar Virtual Edition and Data Domain Virtual Edition are available on AWS and the Microsoft Azure marketplace and can be consumed as subscriptions.

Popular use cases: DPS is commonly purchased in combination with Data Domain in large on-premises environments that include physical systems and virtual machines. NetWorker, Avamar and Data Domain can also be deployed for backing up HDFS environments. In addition, Avamar is often used for backing up servers in branch offices without the need for a local appliance or storage repository by deploying a lightweight software agent. IDPA is purchased by customers looking for simplicity and scale of integrated protection appliances.

Support: Dell EMC offers three different levels of support services — ProSupport with next business day, ProSupport with mission-critical option and ProSupport Plus. ProSupport Plus is the highest level of support and provides customers with direct access to two senior engineers 24/7, and monthly assessment and reporting, in addition to four-hour on-site response to Severity 1 issues.

Strengths

• Dell EMC DPS is a comprehensive suite that addresses data protection requirements in physical, virtual and cloud environments.
• Dell EMC continues to exert strong influence in emerging markets as a result of its strong and loyal partner network.
• Dell EMC provides granular and application-consistent backup and recovery for SAP HANA; backup operations can be managed via SAP HANA CLI and multiple consoles offered by SAP.

Cautions

• Customers must deploy a combination of products — Data Domain Virtual Edition, Avamar Virtual Edition, NetWorker Virtual Edition or Cloud Snapshot Manager to ensure adequate protection in cloud IaaS environments.
• Dell EMC IDPA does not integrate with snapshot capabilities offered by primary storage systems.
• Gartner client interactions demonstrate that existing DPS and Data Domain customers continue to express dissatisfaction regarding high annual maintenance fees.

IBM

Company information: IBM is a technology conglomerate headquartered in Armonk, New York. IBM continues to make significant investments in its product and services portfolio, and to support key initiatives around data center and cloud technologies, analytics, mobility and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Product description and enhancements: IBM’s Spectrum Protect Suite is a collection of multiple products to handle the data protection, hardware snapshot, and archiving needs for customers including physical, virtual, application, and database workloads. The core products are Spectrum Protect, Spectrum Protect Snapshot and Spectrum Protect Plus. Spectrum Protect Plus is a new component in the suite that focuses on ease of use, self-service, data reuse, agentless architecture, role-based access control, automation and low cost for virtual environments only.

In the past year, IBM has led with Spectrum Protect Plus to address enterprise data protection requirements for virtual machines, databases and applications — the first version of which was released in November 2017. It continued to enhance the product and introduce new capabilities such as support for MongoDB and Microsoft Exchange server backup. Enhancements to the Spectrum Protect server include:

• Introduction of a new ransomware detection alert capability
• Ability to store data on IBM Cloud Object Storage write once, read many (WORM) media
• Retention sets for optimized management of archival data
• Tiering of inactive data to object storage to lower overall cost

Delivery model: Spectrum Protect Plus is delivered as a virtual appliance that can be installed in a VMware or Hyper-V environment. Spectrum Protect Plus is agentless, which means it does not require manual installation of code on the protected servers or endpoints.

Pricing model: The Spectrum Protect components are offered as perpetual licenses that have a yearly renewal charge for Software Subscription and Support. Spectrum Protect has different pricing models enabling flexibility for customers. It can be based on back-end capacity (after data reduction) or front-end capacity as well as processor value unit (PVU). IBM also has Entry licensing options for the small and midsize business (SMB) market. Spectrum Protect Plus is included in the Spectrum Protect Suite (or can be purchased separately) and is licensed per virtual machine.

Popular use cases: IBM Spectrum Protect Suite supports a wide variety of platforms, applications, and databases in both physical and virtual environments. Some of the popular use cases include Linux, AIX, Windows, VMware, Hyper-V, Db2, Oracle, SQL Server, Exchange Server and Spectrum Scale (known as General Parallel File System [GPFS] before 2015).

Support: IBM offers its customers 24/7 technical support via its support centers located in all major geographies. IBM’s products are supported by extensive documentation readily available online.

Strengths

• IBM Spectrum Protect scales very well as it can protect 4PB (or more) of data with a single instance of its server as validated and documented in its Spectrum Protect blueprints.
• IBM continues to successfully leverage its extensive and loyal worldwide partner network, which is particularly strong in emerging countries.
• The Spectrum Protect Suite is priced as per-back-end-TB consumed irrespective of application and data type, thus reducing licensing costs significantly.

Cautions

• Spectrum Protect Plus can only be installed as a virtual appliance, which creates a dependency on the virtualization platform for availability and requires additional hypervisor CPU licenses.
• IBM Spectrum Protect Suite currently does not integrate with snapshot capabilities of AWS and Azure virtual instances.
• IBM Spectrum Protect Suite currently offers limited support for emerging technologies such as containers and hyperconverged systems.

Micro Focus

Company information: Micro Focus is a software company with its headquarters based in Newbury, U.K. Micro Focus gained ownership of HP Data Protector in the September 2017 Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) spin/merger of its software business with Micro Focus.

Micro Focus decided not to respond to requests for information for this Magic Quadrant, but did review the draft contents of this research. Therefore, Gartner analysis is based on other credible and accepted public sources.

Product description and enhancements: Data Protector is well positioned for protecting physical and virtual environments. Micro Focus continues to make enhancements to Data Protector, albeit at a slower pace than its competition. It added support for:

• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) as a backup target destination
• Improved integration with HPE StoreOnce
• Improved role-based access control and security

Delivery model: Data Protector is offered as a software-only product and is available as Data Protector Express and Data Protector Premium. The Premium edition provides data protection for both physical and virtual environments as well as a broad range of applications. The Express edition is mainly for virtual environments.

Pricing model: Micro Focus Data Protector supports three licensing schemes:

• Socket-based licensing — available on Data Protector Express with release 10.10
• Traditional licensing based on features and backup targets — available for all versions of Micro Focus Data Protector software
• Capacity-based licensing — available with Micro Focus Data Protector 7.01 and above.

Popular use cases: Data Protector is used mainly in physical environments protecting mission-critical databases and business applications. Data Protector is often bundled with HPE StoreOnce, which is used as a backup target. Data Protector provides deep integration with SAP and SAP HANA environments, protecting both system and tenant databases in stand-alone and cluster SAP systems. Backup and recovery workflows can be directly executed using the SAP HANA Studio/SAP HANA Cockpit GUI or from the Data Protector console.

Support: Micro Focus support engineers provide 24/7 support covering all major geographies.

Strengths

• Data Protector supports a broad range of operating systems, hypervisors, applications and on-premises as well as public cloud storage targets.
• Data Protector provides rich monitoring and analytics capabilities that simplify capacity management and ensure backup performance SLAs are met.
• The automated disaster recovery feature allows physical to physical (P2P) and physical to virtual (P2V) server migration to dissimilar hardware and hypervisor targets.

Cautions

• Data Protector does not currently back up cloud-native IaaS workloads leveraging Cloud Snapshot mechanisms, nor does it back up SaaS applications like Office 365.
• Gartner has observed, through customer interactions and research, that existing Data Protector customers expressed dissatisfaction with the relative slow pace of innovation compared to competition.
• Micro Focus continues to rebuild its channel partner relationships, after the spin/merger with HPE. Based on customer interactions, Gartner has observed that this has resulted in below-average customer experience as channel partners switch to competitive solutions.

Rubrik

Company information: Rubrik is a privately held company, founded in March 2014, based in Palo Alto, California. The company primarily focuses on data protection and management in hybrid IT environments, with a product it calls Cloud Data Management. Rubrik released its first product in 2015 and has seen significant adoption in both the number of customers and revenue since then.

Product description and enhancements: Rubrik’s product portfolio includes the Rubrik Cloud Data Management (RCDM) platform, a scale-out-architecture-based data protection solution with cloud integration, and Polaris, a SaaS-based data management platform. Polaris currently offers two products — Polaris GPS, a tool that facilitates centralized policy management and reporting; and Polaris Radar, which provides ransomware detection and remediation. In 2018, Rubrik acquired Datos IO, a company that specializes in data protection of NoSQL databases.

Rubrik made several investments in its product. In addition to releasing new products such as Polaris GPS and Polaris Radar, it also made enhancements to RCDM by introducing capabilities including:

• Live mount for Oracle Databases
• Support for NAS Direct Archive
• Support for Office 365 backup — Microsoft Exchange only
• Support for SAP HANA backup

Delivery model: Rubrik Cloud Data Management is a scale-out software that can be deployed via Rubrik-provided hardware; third-party hardware from Cisco, HPE or Dell; virtual appliances for edge use cases; or cloud cluster-based deployments.

Pricing model: Rubrik offers perpetual licensing with a fixed annual maintenance cost for all its appliances. The software licensing is all-inclusive and sold as a bundle as a part of each appliance’s capacity and not per front-end TB being protected. Rubrik also offers a software-only version that can be deployed on certified third-party hardware that is licensed based on a back-end TB-per-year subscription. The same pricing model is available for virtual RCDM appliances used to protect public-cloud-native workloads on AWS and Microsoft. RCDM is available on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, but not on the AWS Marketplace. For AWS, Rubrik posted a listing on its private marketplace.

Popular use cases: Rubrik is most commonly deployed by customers to protect highly virtualized on-premises environments and hybrid environments that leverage AWS and Microsoft Azure. In addition, Rubrik sees many of its customers adopting its protection for physical and virtualized databases. Customers often archive data from an on-premises Rubrik appliance to the cloud for long-term retention and/or leverage the public cloud for the purpose for test/dev or disaster recovery.

Support: Support teams are based in eight major cities covering all geographies with a follow-the-sun approach providing global 24/7 support. Proactive monitoring and dedicated technical support engineers are provided as add-on services.

Strengths

• Rubrik customers have reported a high level of product satisfaction, consistently highlighting aspects such as deployment simplicity and simplification of daily operations.
• Rubrik provides a granular and comprehensive set of capabilities for backing up data to the cloud and protecting public-cloud-IaaS-based instances in AWS and Microsoft Azure.
• Rubrik’s Live Mount feature provides automated rapid recovery and test/dev for Oracle Databases and SQL Databases, as well as for VMware and Hyper-V virtual machines.

Cautions

• Rubrik leverages several OEM solutions to deliver total functionality. For example, support for granular recovery of Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint is offered by Ontrack and tape support is offered by sending data to a QStar LTFS back end.
• Protecting virtual machines and applications in public cloud only is cost-prohibitive for small and midsize deployments as it requires a minimum four-node RCDM cluster.
• Deployments in emerging geographies depend heavily on the capabilities of local channel partners as Rubrik continues to expand in these regions.

Unitrends, a Kaseya Company

Company information: Unitrends was acquired by Kaseya in 2018. Kaseya is a privately held company with headquarters in Miami. Kaseya offers IT management solutions for managed service providers (MSPs) and internal IT organizations. Unitrends focuses on data protection solutions for SMBs and upper-midmarket enterprises. As part of the larger Kaseya organization, Unitrends now offers additional data protection capabilities including backup and recovery of SaaS applications through Kaseya’s Spanning Cloud Apps offering.

Product description and enhancements: Unitrends Backup consolidates backup, replication, deduplication and disaster recovery into a single solution. It is available as an easy-to-deploy integrated appliance or as a virtual machine that can be deployed in the cloud or on customers’ own hardware. New features include its eighth-generation appliance, Nutanix AHV integration, and predictive-analytics-based ransomware detection.

Delivery model: Unitrends Backup products are delivered as virtual appliances or Recovery Series hardware appliances. Virtual appliances are software-based VMs that can be deployed on customers’ own hardware or in the cloud. Unitrends appliances are offered in 15 different sizes from 2TB to 120TB, catering to the needs of both small and midsize businesses.

Pricing model: Pricing for appliances is based on usable capacity in the appliance ($/TB). Maintenance is a fixed percentage of the appliance manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) per year and must be purchased for one, three or five years with the appliance. Software is priced for either number of sockets or number of servers being protected and comes in four different editions offering varying levels of protection.

Popular use cases: Unitrends is preferred by enterprises with limited staff, due to its all-in-one solution for both data protection and disaster recovery, delivered in an easy-to-deploy appliance. It makes it easy for organizations to store older backups to the cloud by supporting tiering to AWS, Azure, Google or any S3-compliant object store. Unitrends also supports protection of VMs running in AWS and Azure.

Support: Unitrends provides 24/7 technical support with a team that is colocated with development, both based in the U.S. Unitrends leverages analytic tools to proactively detect hardware failures and identify known problems. Customer references indicate a high degree of satisfaction.

Strengths

• The Recovery Series appliance is available in 18 different models that can serve a broad range of capacity needs of Unitrends’ customers.
• Unitrends Backup software and appliances support all major cloud providers — AWS S3/S3 Standard-Infrequent Access, Microsoft Azure Blob Storage and Google Cloud Storage — as a backup target.
• Unitrends has strong presence and mind share in SMBs and upper-midmarket enterprises.

Cautions

• Unitrends Backup software and appliances do not support granular table-level recovery of relational databases or object-level recovery of Active Directory systems.
• Unitrends does not integrate with hardware snapshots from primary storage arrays, thus impacting host performance and/or storage snapshot management complexity.
• Unitrends has limited influence among large system integrators and channel partners, thus limiting its presence in the large enterprise market.

Veeam

Company information: Veeam is a private software company based in Baar, Switzerland. Veeam was founded in 2006 and has become one of the largest independent data protection software companies. Veeam is adopted by midmarket and enterprise customers focusing on backing up virtualized environments. Over the past few years, Veeam has adopted support for more heterogeneous operating systems, enterprise applications and tape support capabilities to satisfy its growing enterprise customers’ needs.

Product description and enhancements: Veeam’s portfolio consists of the Veeam Availability Suite, which includes Veeam Backup & Replication, Veeam Agents for servers and workstations, Veeam Backup & Replication for AWS and Veeam ONE; with Veeam Backup & Replication being the core product. Veeam Backup & Replication software is available as a free community edition, a standard edition, and an enterprise and enterprise plus edition, where the difference lies in the number of supported options. Veeam Backup & Replication Suite offers agentless backup for VMs, Veeam Agents for heterogeneous support of physical hosts, and Veeam ONE, which provides monitoring and analytics.

In addition, Veeam delivers Availability Orchestrator, which is an enhanced orchestration tool for disaster recovery automation, and N2WS Backup & Recovery, a cloud-native tool for backing up Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and cloud-native AWS applications.

Veeam’s core backup architecture for protecting virtual machines is based on a centralized management server, one or more physical or virtual proxy servers that perform agentless backups, and one or more backup targets that store the data. Heterogeneous clients are protected by using the Veeam Agents.

Veeam made the following changes to its portfolio:

• Acquisition of N2WS for AWS backup and recovery.
• Delivered DataLabs, a redesigned version of Virtual Labs instant mount capability.
• Introduced Veeam Availability Orchestrator.
• Added support for AIX and Solaris.
• Added native cloud tiering to AWS, Azure/Azure Stack, IBM Cloud- and Amazon S3-compliant object storage.
• Delivered two new version of backup for Microsoft Office 365 support (adding SharePoint, OneDrive and performance and scalability improvements).
• Added support for Nutanix AHV.
• Added support for Infinidat and Pure Storage flash arrays.

Delivery model: Veeam delivers software only. However, Veeam partners deliver certified solutions that provide appliancelike experiences. Veeam has a very large service provider network providing a hybrid extension for data center backup, replication, offloading or disaster recovery services. Veeam is completely delivered by the channel and is available on the price lists of multiple server and storage vendors.

Pricing model: Veeam delivers multiple pricing options. In general, customers either buy the software or leverage the subscription model. For traditional purchases, pricing is per physical CPU being protected. Customers leveraging the annual or multiyear subscription model utilize a license per protected VM. Support is priced as a percentage of MSRP price, where the first year of maintenance is free. Subscription-based pricing includes support.

Popular use cases: Veeam’s most popular use case is the backup of virtual machines; however, its installed base for heterogeneous support with Veeam Agents is growing significantly.

Support: Veeam delivers worldwide support services available as Basic support, which includes workday support eight hours a day, five days a week; Production Support, with 24/7 coverage; and Premier Support for its largest customers.

Strengths

• Veeam supports customers transitioning to the cloud by offering compelling hybrid cloud backup and cloud-native backup capabilities for AWS environments.
• Veeam has a large and reliable ecosystem of partners and system integrators that enables it to support customers in both mature and emerging markets.
• Veeam’s customers often highlight its ease of use, simplified deployment and configuration experience.

Cautions

• Delays in comprehensive support for NAS backup is forcing customers to continue using other backup vendor software alongside Veeam.
• While Veeam’s acquisition of N2WS helps it protect AWS customer environments, integration with Microsoft Azure and GCP remains largely a work in progress.
• Veeam lists its product suite at a significantly higher price in Asia/Pacific when compared to other regions.

Veritas Technologies

Company information: Veritas is a privately held company based in Santa Clara, California. It was founded in 1983, before being purchased by Symantec in 2004 and subsequently sold to The Carlyle Group, a global investment firm in 2016. Veritas is a data management software company with a broad portfolio of offerings including backup and recovery, business continuity, information governance, software-defined storage and multicloud data management. Veritas especially caters to the needs of large enterprises.

Product description and enhancements: Veritas’ backup and recovery portfolio includes NetBackup, Backup Exec, and other products for edge devices and SaaS applications. This Magic Quadrant focuses on only NetBackup and NetBackup appliances. NetBackup has been the market leader for revenue in the backup and recovery market for more than a decade, and includes a broad set of functionality and comprehensive protection for traditional applications.

Functionality introduced by Veritas includes:

• Multiple product enhancements to protect new workloads and hypervisors.
• A new web UI that streamlines backup workflows based on role to reduce complexity in day-to-day management seen in previous releases.
• The Smart Meter feature shows real-time front-end TB usage to help stay in license compliance. This feature was introduced to reduce the need for license audits and license true-ups.
• The new CloudCatalyst capability to tier deduplicated backup data to cloud object storage from both on-premises and the cloud, supporting cloud workloads. CloudCatalyst is available as appliance or software edition.

Delivery model: Veritas delivers NetBackup both as a software-only offering that can be deployed on a customer’s own hardware, and as an integrated scale-up appliance that runs the backup software and stores backup data on the same appliance.

Pricing model: NetBackup appliances are priced based on the hardware configuration and the total capacity supported. The NetBackup software offering is available as a metered offering based on either protected capacity, protected physical CPUs or per protected physical server.

Popular use cases: NetBackup is a matured product that is proven in the most demanding environments, thus it is favored by large organizations with a complex mix of legacy, traditional and modern applications.

Support: The Veritas support offering is always based on 24/7 support with a 30-minute response time (Essential). There is an additional option for adding a remote specialist, a designated engineer and a lower response time (Business Critical Services [BCS]) or adding a dedicated account manager with proactive maintenance (BCS Premier)

Strengths

• Veritas NetBackup software supports a broad range of operating systems, hypervisors and relational databases.
• Veritas NetBackup software has proven scale with several customers deploying multiple petabytes and more than 1,000 clients in a single environment.
• Veritas integrates with a wide range of storage arrays; object storage; public, private and hybrid cloud targets; and tape device vendors.

Cautions

• Existing Veritas customers continue to express dissatisfaction with compliance audits, thus forcing them to explore alternative solutions in the market.
• Unlike most new backup appliances in the market, Veritas appliances scale in storage capacity and not compute, requiring additional data movers for better performance in larger environments.
• Veritas requires a cloud gateway — CloudCatalyst — to transfer data to the cloud, thus complicating deployment architecture.

Vendors Added and Dropped

We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants as markets change. As a result of these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant may change over time. A vendor’s appearance in a Magic Quadrant one year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we have changed our opinion of that vendor. It may reflect a change in the market and, therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or of a change of focus by that vendor.

Added

Acronis was added to this Magic Quadrant as it met the inclusion criteria.

Cohesity was added to his Magic Quadrant as it met the inclusion criteria.

Micro Focus was added after it purchased HPE’s backup product — Data Protector.

Dropped

HPE was dropped after it sold its backup product — HPE Data Protector — to Micro Focus.

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

To qualify for inclusion, vendors must meet the following criteria at the time that initial research and survey work commenced (January 2019), unless otherwise noted:

1. The vendor’s qualifying backup and recovery solution(s) must be sold and marketed primarily to upper-midsize and large-enterprise organizations. Gartner defines the upper-end midmarket as being 500 to 999 employees, and the large enterprise as being 1,000 employees or greater. Vendors must provide evidence to support these criteria signed by the CEO or another authorized executive.
2. The vendor’s qualifying backup solutions must focus on protecting enterprise environments running in the data center. The data center can be either a traditional data center or colocated. Protection of cloud-based workloads is seen as an extension of these core capabilities.
3. The vendor must have a backup and recovery solution commercially available for at least three calendar years prior to January 2019, i.e., it must have been commercially available at least as early as 1 January 2016.
4. The vendor must have generated greater than $50 million of total revenue for its data center backup and recovery solution(s) in 2018 (either calendar or fiscal 12 months prior to January 2019) and have an installed base of at least 350 customers within the defined market. In addition, at least 250 of the 350 customers must have implemented protection of a minimum of 100 physical servers or 250 virtual servers from a single deployment. All criteria are exclusive of specific endpoint, branch office or lower-midmarket backup and recovery offerings.
5. The vendor must actively resell and support its branded backup and recovery products in at least two major geographic regions of North America, Europe or Asia/Pacific, with no less than 20% of total revenue and existing customer count originating from outside of its major region.
6. The vendors’ products must support the minimal backup and granular restores for both physical and virtualized deployments of:
   • Hypervisor: VMware and Hyper-V
   • Applications: Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint
   • Operating Systems: Windows and Linux
   • Databases: Oracle and SQL
7. The vendor’s product may be sold either as a software-only offering or as an integrated backup storage appliance (backup application plus backup storage in a single integrated offering).

Exclusion Criteria:

Vendors were excluded from this Magic Quadrant if any of the following criteria applied:

1. Vendors offering products or solutions based on mostly third-party partnership(s).
2. Products that serve as a target or destination for backup, but do not actually perform the backup and restore management function.
3. Vendors offering backup as a service, but not a backup product.
4. Point products to back up endpoints, distributed remote offices and lower-midmarket environments, used in distributed enterprises.
5. Products for a homogeneous environment, such as native tools from Microsoft or VMware, or dedicated to a storage environment, primarily for the vendors’ own platforms.
6. Products that serve primarily as traditional replication and disaster recovery tools.
7. Products that serve primarily for managing existing snapshot and replication capabilities of storage arrays.

Gartner will continue to cover emerging vendors, as well as vendors and products that do not yet meet the above inclusion criteria.

Evaluation Criteria

Ability to Execute

Gartner analysts evaluate vendors on the quality and efficacy of the processes, systems, methods or procedures that enable IT provider performance to be competitive, efficient and effective, and to positively impact revenue, retention and reputation within Gartner’s view of the market.

Product/Service: Core goods and services that compete in and/or serve the defined market. This includes current product and service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills, etc. Specific characteristics considered include:

• Breadth of offerings
• Depth and functionality of the various products
• Value-added products

Overall Viability (Business Unit, Financial, Strategy, Organization): Financials: This is an assessment of the organization’s overall financial health, the financial and practical success of the business unit, and the likelihood that the individual business unit will continue to invest in the product and advance the state of the art in the organization’s product portfolio. Specific characteristics considered include:

• Market metrics, profitability and revenue growth
• Overall organization’s financial health
• Level of investment in this market
• Strategic stability (no strategy shifts, platform shifts, disruptive changes, etc.)

Sales Execution/Pricing: Gartner looks at the vendor’s capabilities in all presales activities and the structure that supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation, presales support, and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel. Specific characteristics considered include:

• Number of new customers added during the past 12 months
• Number of customers renewed during the past 12 months
• Distribution of customers in terms of number protected CPUs or capacity, customer size and vertical segments
• Competitiveness and diversity of pricing options
• Transparency and ease of pricing including line items, list prices and discounts

Market Responsiveness and Track Record: Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve, and market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendor’s history of responsiveness to changing market demands. Specific characteristics considered include:

• Product enhancements during the past 12 months that align with vision
• New product and service launches during the past 12 months that align with the vendor’s vision
• Track record of new product success
• On-time delivery of roadmap

Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver the organization’s message in order to influence the market, promote the brand, increase awareness of products and establish a positive identification in the minds of customers. This “mind share” can be driven by a combination of publicity, promotional, thought leadership, social media, referrals and sales activities. Specific characteristics considered include:

• Mind share among customers, that is, Gartner end users that mentioned the vendor without being prompted.
• Marketing messages that are based in the vendor’s ability to deliver real business value, not empty hype or unfounded claims.
• Clear messaging, product naming and an ability to succinctly state why the vendor and/or its product(s) are unique.
• How well the messaging resonated with the buying public without causing confusion.

Customer Experience: The experience of quality for supplier/buyer interactions product satisfaction, technical support, or account support. This may also include ancillary tools, customer support programs, availability of user groups, service-level agreements, etc. Specific characteristics considered include:

• Ease of doing business and quality of account management.
• Level of satisfaction about the product based on reference checks and Gartner inquiries.
• Quality and responsiveness of the vendor’s technical support.
• The portal experience, including ticketing, billing, usefulness of the documentation and customer communications.
• Service-level agreements.
• Contract quality.

Operations: The ability of the organization to meet goals and commitments. Factors include:

• Quality of the organizational structure
• Skills
• Experiences
• Programs
• Systems
• Other vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and efficiently

Table 1: Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria

Evaluation Criteria	Weighting
Product or Service	High
Overall Viability	High
Sales Execution/Pricing	High
Market Responsiveness/Record	High
Marketing Execution	Medium
Customer Experience	High
Operations	Not Rated

Source: Gartner (October 2019)

Completeness of Vision

Gartner analysts evaluate a vendor’s ability to convincingly articulate its view of the market. This includes current and future market direction, innovation, customer needs, and competitive forces and how well they map to Gartner’s view of the market.

Market Understanding: Gartner looks at the technology provider’s ability to understand buyer’s needs, and to translate those needs into products and services. Vendors that show the highest degree of vision, listen to and understand buyer’s wants and needs, and can shape or enhance those wants and needs with their added vision receive high ratings. Specific characteristics considered include:

• Vision of current and future buyer needs.
• Overall product and service portfolio alignment with market needs.
• Short- and long-term strategy for realizing this vision.

Marketing Strategy: Clear, differentiated messaging consistently communicated internally, externalized through social media, advertising, customer programs and positioning statements. Specific characteristics considered include current status and future changes to:

• Marketing mix and channels.
• Clear messaging and customer guidance on evolution of different generations of products.
• Clear and consistent positioning of multiple or overlapping products.

Sales Strategy: This considers the vendor’s strategy for selling products. Does it use the appropriate network of direct and indirect sales, marketing, service and communication affiliates that extend the scope and depth of market reach and sales efficiency?

Specific characteristics considered include current status and future changes to:

• Scale product and services sales.
• Direct versus indirect mix of products and services.

Offering (Product) Strategy: A vendor’s approach to product development and delivery that emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature set as they map to current and future requirements. Specific characteristics considered include current status and future changes to:

• Dedication to data protection.
• Resources aligned to product development.
• Product development methodology.
• Strategy to enhance existing products with new features.
• Strategy to enhance the product portfolio with new products (buy, build, integrate).
• Strategy to differentiate products from the competition.

Business Model: The soundness and logic of a vendor’s underlying business proposition. Does the vendor understand how to leverage key assets to grow profitability? Can it gain additional revenue by charging separately for optional, high-value features in the data protection market? Other key attributes of the business model are reflected in how the vendor uses partnerships to increase sales. The ability to build strong partnerships with a broad range of technology partners and associated system integrators demonstrates leadership. Specific characteristics considered include the current status and future changes to:

• Business logic and design (how to make money and remain profitable)
• Additional revenue generation (sell up)
• Future scalability
• Partnerships
• Ecosystem

Vertical/Industry Strategy: This measures the vendor’s strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of industry and/or vertical markets. Specific characteristics considered include current status and future changes to:

• Resources aligned to different verticals or industries.
• Industry- and/or vertical-specific offerings like regulated workloads such as healthcare, government, and PCI-compliant e-commerce, including associated marketing collateral and programs.
• Industry-specific independent software vendors (ISVs) and channel partners.

Innovation: This measures a vendor’s ability to move the market into new solution areas, and to define and deliver new technologies. Specific characteristics considered include the current status and future changes to:

• Track record for innovation.
• Roadmap for the next 12 months that enhances existing products or services.
• Roadmap for the next 12 months to add new products or services.
• Roadmap for the next 12 months to address new markets.

Geographic Strategy: The vendor’s strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of geographies outside the “home” or native geography, either directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries, as appropriate for that geography and market. Specific characteristics considered include current status and future changes to:

• Twelve-month global expansion strategy outside the home market for:
  • Locations
  • Revenue growth
  • Sales and presales
  • Channel partners
  • Support

Table 2: Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria

Evaluation Criteria	Weighting
Market Understanding	High
Marketing Strategy	Medium
Sales Strategy	Medium
Offering (Product) Strategy	High
Business Model	Medium
Vertical/Industry Strategy	Medium
Innovation	High
Geographic Strategy	Medium

Source: Gartner (October 2019)

Quadrant Descriptions

Leaders

Leaders have the highest combined measures of Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. They have the most comprehensive and scalable product portfolios. They have a proven track record of established market presence and financial performance. For vision, they are perceived in the industry as thought leaders, and have well-articulated plans for enhancing recovery capabilities, improving ease of deployment and administration, and increasing their scalability and product breadth. A fundamental sea change is occurring in the backup and recovery market. For vendors to have long-term success, they must plan to address the legacy requirements of traditional backup and recovery, while looking to expand their integration with and exploitation of emerging applications, hypervisors, snapshot and replication technologies, and public cloud capabilities. A cornerstone for Leaders is the ability to articulate how new requirements will be addressed as part of their vision for recovery management. As a group, Leaders can be expected to be considered part of most new-purchase proposals and to have high success rates in winning new business. This does not mean, however, that a large market share alone is a primary indicator of a Leader. Leaders are strategic vendors, well positioned for the future having established success in meeting the needs of upper-midsize and large data centers.

Challengers

Challengers can execute today, but they have a more limited vision than Leaders, or they have yet to fully produce or market their vision. They have capable products and can perform well for many enterprises. These vendors have the financial and market resources and the capabilities to potentially become Leaders, but the important question is whether they understand the market trends and market requirements to succeed tomorrow, and whether they can sustain their momentum by executing at a high level over time. A Challenger may have a robust backup portfolio, but has not yet been able to fully leverage its opportunities or does not have the same ability as Leaders to influence end-user expectations and/or be considered for substantially more or broader deployments. These vendors may not devote sufficient development resources to delivering products with broad industry appeal and differentiated features in a timely manner, or effectively market their capabilities and/or fully exploit enough field resources to result in a greater market presence.

Visionaries

Visionaries are forward-thinking, advancing their portfolio capabilities ahead, or well ahead, of the market, but their overall execution has not propelled them into being Challengers or possibly Leaders. (Often, this is due to limited sales and marketing or elongated time to initially install and configure, but sometimes due to scalability or breadth of functionality and/or platform support.) These vendors are predominantly differentiated by product innovation and perceived customer benefits, but because some are relatively new to the market, they have not yet achieved solution completeness or sustained broad sales, marketing and mind share success, or demonstrated continued successful large-enterprise deployments required to give them the higher visibility of Leaders. Some vendors move out of the Visionaries quadrant and into the Niche Players quadrant because their technology is no longer visionary (the competition caught up to them) and/or they have not been able to establish a market presence that justifies moving to the Challengers or Leaders quadrants, or even remaining in the Visionaries quadrant.

Niche Players

It is important to note that Gartner does not recommend eliminating Niche Players from customer evaluations. Niche Players are specifically and consciously focused on a subsegment of the overall market, or they offer relatively broad capabilities without very-large-enterprise scale, or the overall success of competitors in other quadrants. In several cases, Niche Players are very strong in the upper-midsize-enterprise segment, and they also opportunistically sell to large enterprises, but with offerings and overall services that, at present, are not as complete as other vendors focused on the large-enterprise market. Niche Players may focus on specific geographies, vertical markets, or a focused backup deployment or use-case service; or they may simply have modest horizons and/or lower overall capabilities compared with competitors. Other Niche Player vendors are too new to the market or have fallen behind, and, although worth watching, have yet to fully develop complete functionality, or to consistently demonstrate an expansive vision or the Ability to Execute.

Context

Data is the lifeblood of every organization, and, as such, it must be protected not only from an availability point of view, but also from a recoverability point of view. Thus, backup and recovery are and remain one of the most critical, but also most challenging, operations in the data center, as they require an additional architecture on top off the core application to protect and recover the data.

Backup and recovery have always been challenging, as it is much harder to copy and extract data from an application than it is to create the actual data. In particular, the extreme growth of data, new application and data types, new deployment models like cloud, and new threats like ransomware make this a daunting task.

The practice of backup and recovery has undergone a number of changes (such as new protection and recovery techniques, new deployment options and pricing models, and a new, expanded set of vendors to consider). It has also seen challenges, such as how to protect server-virtualized environments, very large databases, emerging next-generation databases and big data applications, as well as how to integrate with the cloud and/or how to protect IaaS, PaaS and SaaS applications. Gartner end-user inquiry call volume regarding backup has been rising continuously over the past years. Organizations worldwide are seeking ways to dramatically simplify the art of data protection and recovery.

Market Overview

For years now, many organizations have continued to rearchitect their backups to modernize their approach in order to handle new data types and deployment models, and increased workload volumes, and to improve backup and restore times to meet rising SLAs. Disk-based solutions (including backup directly to disk and, perhaps additionally, to a cloud target; array-based snapshot and replication exploitation; server virtualization backup features; and leveraging compression, deduplication and other data management efficiency technologies) are default today. However, as data continues to grow, new applications and deployment models will grow and this situation will persist.

Today, ease of deployment, instant recovery and, especially, a greater ease of daily administration are key requirements. The backup and recovery market is also consolidating many features like data replication, (cloud) disaster recovery automation and orchestration, and intercloud data mobility on a single platform. In addition, backup vendors are adding data management functionality to their backup platforms to support analytics, test/dev and/or ransomware detection on cloud copies of backup data to deliver a higher return on the investment of data protection.

Gartner sees that many organizations are willing to deploy multiple backup solutions in an attempt to best match the needs of what is being protected (Office 365, remote office, VMs, SharePoint, etc.), to contain product costs and/or to implement a solution that the staff will find easy to use. As a result, large vendors are no longer viewed as being safe choices, with many losing market share to emerging providers. Today, the market is willing to take on more risk with vendors and solutions than in the past; a trend that Gartner believes will remain on the rise for the next several years

Evidence

Placement on the Magic Quadrant is based on Gartner’s view of a vendor’s performance against the criteria noted in this research. Gartner’s view regarding vendor placement on the Magic Quadrant is heavily influenced by more than 2,800 inquiries, and conferences and one-on-one meetings with Gartner clients on the topic of backup/recovery solutions, conducted since the publication of the last iteration of this Magic Quadrant. Gartner also utilizes worldwide end-user surveys, Gartner conference kiosk surveys, Gartner conference session polling data, gartner.com Research Circle polls and Gartner Peer Insights. The Magic Quadrant methodology includes the solicitation of references from each vendor; for this Magic Quadrant, Gartner conducted more than 140 reference checks (via electronic survey and/or live interview) from a set of customers provided by each vendor. The included vendors submitted just over 500 pages of responses to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant survey on this topic, which were used as the basis for subsequent vendor briefings and follow-up meetings, product demonstrations, and correspondence.

Additionally, this research drew input from other Gartner analysts, industry contacts and public sources, such as U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings, articles, speeches, published papers and public domain videos.

Evaluation Criteria Definitions

Ability to Execute

Product/Service: Core goods and services offered by the vendor for the defined market. This includes current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills and so on, whether offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships as defined in the market definition and detailed in the subcriteria.

Overall Viability: Viability includes an assessment of the overall organization's financial health, the financial and practical success of the business unit, and the likelihood that the individual business unit will continue investing in the product, will continue offering the product and will advance the state of the art within the organization's portfolio of products.

Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor's capabilities in all presales activities and the structure that supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation, presales support, and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel.

Market Responsiveness/Record: Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve and market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendor's history of responsiveness.

Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver the organization's message to influence the market, promote the brand and business, increase awareness of the products, and establish a positive identification with the product/brand and organization in the minds of buyers. This "mind share" can be driven by a combination of publicity, promotional initiatives, thought leadership, word of mouth and sales activities.

Customer Experience: Relationships, products and services/programs that enable clients to be successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the ways customers receive technical support or account support. This can also include ancillary tools, customer support programs (and the quality thereof), availability of user groups, service-level agreements and so on.

Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. Factors include the quality of the organizational structure, including skills, experiences, programs, systems and other vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing basis.

Completeness of Vision

Market Understanding: Ability of the vendor to understand buyers' wants and needs and to translate those into products and services. Vendors that show the highest degree of vision listen to and understand buyers' wants and needs, and can shape or enhance those with their added vision.

Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of messages consistently communicated throughout the organization and externalized through the website, advertising, customer programs and positioning statements.

Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling products that uses the appropriate network of direct and indirect sales, marketing, service, and communication affiliates that extend the scope and depth of market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and the customer base.

Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendor's approach to product development and delivery that emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature sets as they map to current and future requirements.

Business Model: The soundness and logic of the vendor's underlying business proposition.

Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of individual market segments, including vertical markets.

Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes.

Geographic Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography, either directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for that geography and market.

© 2019 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and its affiliates. This publication may not be reproduced or distributed in any form without Gartner's prior written permission. It consists of the opinions of Gartner's research organization, which should not be construed as statements of fact. While the information contained in this publication has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. Although Gartner research may address legal and financial issues, Gartner does not provide legal or investment advice and its research should not be construed or used as such. Your access and use of this publication are governed by Gartner’s Usage Policy. Gartner prides itself on its reputation for independence and objectivity. Its research is produced independently by its research organization without input or influence from any third party. For further information, see "Guiding Principles on Independence and Objectivity."

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