Integrate or sell more stuff?

From a backup perspective, the world is at an inflection point. Today’s requirements for growth, rapid data access and speedy recovery are outstripping the industry’s ability to solve backup challenges. Cobbling together stove-piped point solutions is costly to scale and the rapid adoption of virtualization is further stressing backup windows due to legacy processes designed for serial tape.

As the world moves to disk-based backup it needs an integrated solution. If it doesn’t get one, customers will find it increasingly difficult to justify appliance-based disk premiums and will turn to software-led approaches that scale independently of hardware. Or if software vendors (e.g. Microsoft and Veritas) add file system capabilities that perform de-duplication on primary storage, the lack of an integrated solution from hardware vendors will pressure margins.