For: Infrastructure The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Backup

And Recovery Software, Q2 2013

& Operations
Professionals

by Rachel A. Dines, June 28, 2013

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Plagued By Age-Old Backup And Recovery Problems, Firms Look To

Upgrade
The enterprise backup and recovery software market is, as ever, in a state of flux as more
and more I&O professionals grow tired of traditional backup methods. From missed
backup windows to slow or failed recoveries, many firms are weary of the constant battle
with their backup software and are looking for a change.

Backup Isn’t Just About Backup Anymore – It’s About Improved

Resiliency
Today’s backup and recovery software suites are evolving beyond simple backup and
restore. Today, many of the differentiating capabilities are focused on continuity, restore,
replication, and automation, allowing I&O pros to integrate their backup suites into
their business technology resiliency strategies in new ways.

Cloud, Continuity, And App Integration Are The Key Differentiators

As organizations move from tape, to disk, to cloud technologies, and begin focusing
on resiliency not recovery, they will require a new breed of backup and recovery
suites. Differentiating features include advanced application and hypervisor awareness;
improved backup target integrations; and more recovery and continuity features.

Forrester Research, Inc., 60 Acorn Park Drive, Cambridge, MA 02140 USA

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FOR INFRASTRUCTURE & OPERATIONS PROFESSIONALS JUNE 28, 2013

The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Backup And

Recovery Software, Q2 2013
The Six Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
by Rachel A. Dines
with Stephanie Balaouras and Jessica McKee

WHY READ THIS REPORT

In Forrester’s 61-criteria evaluation of enterprise backup and recovery software vendors, we identified
the six most significant software providers — ASG, CommVault, EMC, HP, IBM, and Symantec — in
the category and researched, analyzed, and scored them. This report details our findings about how well
each vendor fulfills our criteria and where they stand in relation to each other to help infrastructure and
operations (I&O) professionals select the right partner for their backup and recovery software suites.

Table Of Contents Notes & Resources

2 Enterprises Continue To Struggle With Basic Forrester conducted product evaluations
Backup Challenges in March 2013 and interviewed 16 user
companies and six vendor companies: ASG,
3 Enterprise Backup And Recovery Software
CommVault, EMC, HP, IBM, and Symantec.
Evaluation Overview
4 Four Leaders Emerge In The Backup And Related Research Documents
Recovery Software Space
Master The Eight Disruptors That Will
7 Vendor Profiles: ASG, CommVault, EMC, HP, Transform Business Technology Resiliency In
IBM, And Symantec 2013
9 Supplemental Material February 15, 2013
Market Overview: Disk Libraries, Q1 2012
January 17, 2012
Market Overview: Enterprise-Class Backup
And Recovery Software
November 19, 2010

© 2013, Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. Information is based on best available
resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. Forrester®, Technographics®, Forrester Wave, RoleView, TechRadar,
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The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Backup And Recovery Software, Q2 2013 2

ENTERPRISES CONTINUE TO STRUGGLE WITH BASIC BACKUP CHALLENGES

Many organizations view backup as one of the necessary evils of running IT — something that we
must do, even if it is painful, slow, and expensive, and seems to provide zero strategic business value.
As a result, many I&O professionals let their backup and recovery software suites languish — either
using out-of-date versions or letting maintenance run out. Worse, some I&O pros are giving up
on backing up certain systems in a last-ditch effort to improve backup windows. While the latest
and greatest technology isn’t the answer to every problem, today’s backup and recovery suites are
evolving to solve many of these challenges and more.

Today’s Backup And Recovery Suites Offer More Than Operational Backup And
Restore
The backup and recovery suites we evaluated in this Forrester Wave evaluation strive to add value
beyond simple operational backup and restore. While the future of backup software is still in flux,
Forrester believes that it will involve more continuity and resiliency tools, additional endpoint
functionality, and cloud-optimized infrastructures. Look for key differentiators in the market, including:

■ Application and hypervisor awareness. The ability to back up key applications nondisruptively
and then quickly restore the entire system or just individual objects is an area where existing
backup solutions are still evolving. All of the evaluated vendors in this Forrester Wave
evaluation have some application expertise, but most still require agents or multiple backups
to achieve granular restore. Similarly, in the hypervisor arena, most vendors have strong
capabilities in the VMware suite, but they lack support for other hypervisors.

■ Advanced backup target integrations. All of the evaluated solutions have the ability to target
virtually any disk or tape target, but the ability to use the cloud as a backup target is an emerging
feature. With interest and adoption of disk-to-disk-to-cloud (D2D2C) backup architectures
starting to take off — 26% of enterprises have already adopted, with another 16% looking to
adopt — this could be a significant differentiator in your decision-making process.1 Additionally,
backup accelerators, which allow for more efficient backups with greater integration between
hardware and software, are increasing in popularity.

■ Continuity and recovery features. As backup strategies become tightly integrated into your
business technology resiliency strategy, the advanced continuity and recovery features in backup
solutions become more important. Today’s backup solutions offer capabilities such as the ability
to boot virtual machines (VMs) directly out of a backup store or the ability to call array-based
snapshots, which are then stored in native formats for quick recovery. These are in addition to
host-based replication and continuous data protection capabilities that started appearing in
backup software suites during the past five years.

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The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Backup And Recovery Software, Q2 2013 3

Acquisitions And Megavendors Shape The Backup Software Landscape

Most of the IT giants have offerings in the backup software market — although integration with
hardware offerings in the same space is still lacking. Beyond the megavendors (EMC, HP, IBM),
there are also several independent software vendors that provide strong offerings in this space (ASG,
CommVault, Symantec). Many of the vendors in this evaluation have made significant acquisitions
in recent years to develop their backup and recovery capabilities: ASG (Atempo), EMC (Avamar),
IBM (FilesX), and Symantec (DataCenter Technologies), to name a few. What we see today is a
consolidated market with a half-dozen vendors providing solutions in the enterprise data center
space, although many of the evaluated providers suffer from fragmented or loosely integrated
software suites.

ENTERPRISE BACKUP AND RECOVERY SOFTWARE EVALUATION OVERVIEW

To assess the state of the enterprise backup and recovery software market and see how the vendors
stack up against each other, Forrester evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of top vendors.

Criteria Focus On Key Features, Vision, Ability To Execute And Global Presence
After examining past research, user need assessments, and vendor and expert interviews, we
developed a comprehensive set of evaluation criteria. We evaluated vendors against 61 criteria,
which we grouped into three high-level buckets:

■ Current offering. We evaluated the current offering of the participating vendors by looking
at their capabilities in the arenas of data reduction, primary deduplication, ability to support
different backup targets from tape to cloud, advanced backup, restore and continuity capabilities,
heterogeneous platform support, security and error-checking capabilities, manageability, and
scalability. Forrester evaluated only software capabilities, regardless of whether the vendor
provides a hardware platform.

■ Strategy. The strategy scores are based on the company’s vision for backup and recovery and
its plans for product improvements. In addition, Forrester looked at R&D investments in the
individual products, strategic partnerships, and customer satisfaction (based on customer surveys).

■ Market presence. To measure market presence, Forrester looked at the installed base, total company
revenue and revenue growth, go-to-market partnerships, global customer service coverage,
professional services and consulting capabilities, sales staff, and global geographic presence.

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The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Backup And Recovery Software, Q2 2013 4

Vendors Have A Scalable Server Backup Suite With Broad Platform Support
Forrester included six vendors in the assessment: ASG, CommVault, EMC, HP, IBM, and Symantec.
Each of these vendors has (see Figure 1):

■ An enterprise backup software solution designed for data center backups. In this evaluation,
Forrester only looked at the software components of vendors’ offerings. Solutions that focused
only on enterprise remote offices, branch offices, or endpoints were not considered in this report.

■ Proven scale for the large enterprise. Vendors included in this evaluation must have more than
100 current customers with more than 1 petabyte (PB) of backup data under management and
at least one customer with more than 10 PB of backup data under management.

■ Heterogeneous platform support. The product must support backups of all major versions of
Windows, Unix, Linux, VMware, Hyper-V, and Citrix Systems.

Figure 1 Evaluated Vendors: Product Information And Selection Criteria

Vendor Product evaluated Software version

ASG ASG-Time Navigator 4.3

CommVault Simpana 10.0

EMC Backup Portfolio (Avamar and NetWorker) Avamar 7.0

NetWorker 8.1

HP Data Protector 7.0

IBM Tivoli Storage Manager 6.4

Symantec NetBackup 7.5

Evaluation criteria:
An enterprise backup software solution designed for data center backups. In this evaluation,
Forrester looked only at the software components of vendor’s offerings. Solutions that focused only on
enterprise remote offices, branch offices, or endpoints were not considered in this report.

Proven scale for the large enterprise. Vendors included in this evaluation must have more than 100
current customers with more than 1 petabye (PB) of backup data under management and at least one
customer with more than 10 PB of backup data under management.

Heterogeneous platform support. The product must support backups of all major versions of Windows,
Unix, Linux, VMware, Hyper-V, and Citrix.

Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

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The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Backup And Recovery Software, Q2 2013 5

FOUR LEADERS EMERGE IN THE BACKUP AND RECOVERY SOFTWARE SPACE

The evaluation uncovered a market in which there are several Leaders, which is unsurprising in a
relatively mature market segment (see Figure 2):

■ CommVault, EMC, IBM, and Symantec lead the pack. It’s a tight four-horse race for the
top honors — CommVault, EMC, IBM, and Symantec all scored high on strategy and current
offerings. However, each of these solutions is very different and each presents its own set of
strengths and weaknesses. CommVault touts its simplicity and unified platform, while EMC
has strong integration with its hardware portfolio. IBM excels in extremely large and complex
environments, and Symantec focuses on data and cost reduction.

■ HP offers a competitive alternative. HP trails just behind the lead pack with Data Protector,
a solid solution that just hasn’t seen the focus or investment that it deserves. Under new
management and with a renewed focus on the customer, HP could catch up in the near future.

■ ASG needs to play catch-up. ASG is brand new to the backup market and it shows — the
company is still working to position ASG-Time Navigator in its greater portfolio. While Atempo
has had solutions in the market since 1992, lack of investment in developing the product during
the past several years has resulted in several key features missing in the solution set.

This evaluation of the enterprise backup and recovery software market is intended to be a starting
point only. We encourage clients to view detailed product evaluations and adapt criteria weightings
to fit their individual needs through the Forrester Wave Excel-based vendor comparison tool.

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The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Backup And Recovery Software, Q2 2013 6

Figure 2 Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Backup And Recovery Software, Q2 ’13

Risky Strong
Bets Contenders Performers Leaders
Strong

CommVault
Go online to download
EMC
IBM the Forrester Wave tool
for more detailed product
Symantec evaluations, feature
HP comparisons, and
customizable rankings.

Current
offering
ASG

Market presence

Weak

Weak Strategy Strong

Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

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The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Backup And Recovery Software, Q2 2013 7

Figure 2 Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Backup And Recovery Software, Q2 ’13 (Cont.)

CommVault
Weighting
Forrester’s

Symantec
EMC
ASG

IBM
HP
CURRENT OFFERING 50% 2.28 4.45 4.14 3.30 4.04 3.88
Data reduction capabilities and scalability 15% 2.00 5.00 5.00 3.00 4.00 4.00
Backup targets 10% 1.20 3.18 3.90 2.75 2.35 4.10
Advanced backup options 20% 2.20 4.30 3.45 3.60 3.80 4.10
Encryption 5% 4.50 5.00 3.50 3.50 5.00 5.00
Platform support 10% 4.33 4.38 4.78 4.33 4.33 4.78
Continuity and restore features 10% 2.00 4.00 5.00 3.00 5.00 5.00
Backup verification and error checking 5% 1.00 5.00 3.00 3.00 5.00 0.00
Complementary modules 10% 1.00 5.00 3.50 2.50 3.50 3.50
Manageability 10% 2.80 5.00 4.40 3.30 5.00 2.50
Setup and implementation 0% 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
Scalability 5% 2.70 3.70 4.30 4.40 3.30 4.40

STRATEGY 50% 2.84 4.36 4.60 3.58 3.85 4.33

Corporate and product strategy 45% 2.50 4.50 4.50 2.50 3.50 3.50
Research and development 15% 3.40 2.20 3.80 3.00 1.80 5.00
Strategic partnerships 25% 3.00 5.00 5.00 5.00 5.00 5.00
Cost 0% 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
Customer satisfaction 15% 3.00 5.00 5.00 5.00 5.00 5.00

MARKET PRESENCE 0% 1.80 2.82 4.29 3.72 3.74 4.09

Installed base 35% 0.79 2.46 4.13 3.63 3.48 4.15
Revenue 15% 1.00 1.00 3.00 5.00 5.00 3.00
Revenue growth 10% 3.00 5.00 5.00 1.00 1.00 3.00
Go-to-market partnerships 10% 1.50 2.50 4.00 3.00 4.00 5.00
Customer service 5% 3.00 4.75 5.00 5.00 5.00 4.00
Professional services and consulting 5% 3.45 4.40 5.00 5.00 4.40 3.80
Sales staff 10% 1.00 1.00 5.00 3.00 3.00 5.00
Geographic presence 10% 5.00 5.00 5.00 5.00 5.00 5.00
All scores are based on a scale of 0 (weak) to 5 (strong).
Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

VENDOR PROFILES: ASG, COMMVAULT, EMC, HP, IBM, AND SYMANTEC

Leaders: CommVault, EMC, Symantec, And IBM Vie For Top Honors
■ CommVault excels with an integrated platform. CommVault’s primary strategy centers
on providing a single platform for backup, recovery, continuity, archive, and other data
management and protection strategies. The 17-year-old company uses its relative youth to

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The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Backup And Recovery Software, Q2 2013 8

its advantage, touting a modern approach to data protection. CommVault scored high in the
current offering section and is in a virtual tie for top honors with competitor EMC. Areas of
strength for CommVault include its deduplication capabilities and cloud-target integrations, as
well as hypervisor and application capabilities. The company also received high marks in the
professional services and consulting area, which is a newly expanded offering for CommVault.
While its market share is still considerably smaller than the other giants in the Leaders category,
CommVault continues to see rapid growth, nearly doubling its customer base during the past
four years.

■ EMC focuses on hardware and software integration. The storage giant focuses its backup
software strategy on storage protection across many different silos, architectures, and
applications. While the EMC Backup Portfolio is actually composed of four fairly independent
products — NetWorker, Avamar, Data Protection Advisor, and Data Domain — the company
now licenses the three software solutions together in a capacity-based bundle and has an
objective of eliminating backup silos. There is still additional work ahead for EMC to integrate
these solutions in a tighter fashion. EMC scored high in deduplication capabilities, platform
support, and scalability. It also leads the pack in the strategy section, where it scored very high
in corporate and product strategy and R&D investment.

■ Symantec reinvents itself and refines focus. Symantec’s focus is on backup transformation
and allowing its customers to spend less time, money, and resources on the backup process.
Thus, it is focusing investments on improved management and self-service, automation, and
application integration. While the software vendor has hit some road bumps as a corporate
entity, if the organization can execute on its vision, the new “Symantec 4.0” holds promise for
the backup and recovery division. In this evaluation, Symantec scored high in the platform
support categories, which is consistent with its strategy, as well as continuity and restore features
and R&D investment. Despite Symantec being primarily a software company, NetBackup boasts
some of the most robust hardware integrations, including the ability to control snapshots and
replication on the primary storage and the support of several different backup accelerators.

■ IBM simplifies management, focuses on cloud. IBM’s strategy in the backup and recovery
space is to bring scalable, high-quality, and simple products to market in order to store, analyze,
and protect data. Recently, the company has also placed increased focus on cloud — both
providing capabilities for cloud service providers to use its platform for service offerings and
integrating with cloud storage. One continued weakness for IBM is its lack of integration
with its hardware and services portfolio. While the company has made some improvements
during the past few years, there is still a significant gap between the lines of business. It has,
however, successfully integrated the FastBack and Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) capabilities
into a unified offering. IBM scored well in its current offering, with strengths in deduplication,
manageability (due to significant improvements in TSM Operations Center), continuity, and
restore features.

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The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Backup And Recovery Software, Q2 2013 9

Strong Performers: HP Trails Close Behind The Leader Group

■ HP aims to provide analytics from its backup platform. Now under the HP Autonomy
division’s management, HP’s backup and recovery group focuses on reducing data footprints,
gaining analytics from backup data, and converging multiple platforms. In the coming year,
it will focus on converging and integrating multiple assets throughout the Autonomy and
legacy Iron Mountain Digital portfolio in server backup, endpoint backup, and archive using
Autonomy Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) as a backbone. Like Symantec, HP has
recently seen some tumultuous times, but it appears to be heading in the right direction with
a focus on transparency, customer satisfaction, and delivering “HP on HP.” While HP fell
just short of the Leaders group, it scored well in platform support and scalability, with strong
hypervisor and application capabilities (although it was unable to demonstrate all of these
advanced capabilities during its product demo).

Contenders: ASG Works To Integrate The Acquisition Of Atempo

■ ASG integrates acquisition and focuses on IT service continuity management. ASG’s focus is
in the world of IT service management (ITSM), which may be why some industry veterans were
surprised to see it acquire a backup and recovery software company. To ASG, however, Atempo
fills a key portion of the ITSM life cycle: IT service continuity management and availability
management. With the acquisition of Atempo now more than a year old, ASG has worked hard
to bring the company into the fold, and it’s made significant progress. ASG integrated Atempo
organizationally, and it has also taken steps to integrate existing ASG products like ASG-
TrackBird and Enterprise Automation Management Suite into ASG-Live Navigator. While ASG
is missing many of the advanced backup and data reduction capabilities of its competitors, it
scored well in platform support and aspects of scalability. And while ASG’s market share is quite
small compared with most of the other vendors in this Forrester Wave evaluation, it has many
large implementations and has a healthy investment in R&D for its products.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

Online Resource
The online version of Figure 2 is an Excel-based vendor comparison tool that provides detailed
product evaluations and customizable rankings.

Data Sources Used In This Forrester Wave

Forrester used a combination of three data sources to assess the strengths and weaknesses of
each solution:

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The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Backup And Recovery Software, Q2 2013 10

■ Vendor surveys. Forrester surveyed vendors on their capabilities as they relate to the evaluation
criteria. Once we analyzed the completed vendor surveys, we conducted vendor calls where
necessary to gather details of vendor qualifications.

■ Product demos. We asked vendors to conduct demonstrations of their product’s functionality. We

used findings from these product demos to validate details of each vendor’s product capabilities.

■ Customer reference surveys. To validate product and vendor qualifications, Forrester also
conducted online surveys with at least two of each vendor’s current customers.

The Forrester Wave Methodology

We conduct primary research to develop a list of vendors that meet our criteria to be evaluated
in this market. From that initial pool of vendors, we then narrow our final list. We choose these
vendors based on: 1) product fit; 2) customer success; and 3) Forrester client demand. We eliminate
vendors that have limited customer references and products that don’t fit the scope of our evaluation.

After examining past research, user need assessments, and vendor and expert interviews, we develop
the initial evaluation criteria. To evaluate the vendors and their products against our set of criteria, we
gather details of product qualifications through a combination of lab evaluations, questionnaires,
demos, and/or discussions with client references. We send evaluations to the vendors for their review,
and we adjust the evaluations to provide the most accurate view of vendor offerings and strategies.

We set default weightings to reflect our analysis of the needs of large user companies — and/or
other scenarios as outlined in the Forrester Wave document — and then score the vendors based
on a clearly defined scale. These default weightings are intended only as a starting point, and we
encourage readers to adapt the weightings to fit their individual needs through the Excel-based
tool. The final scores generate the graphical depiction of the market based on current offering,
strategy, and market presence. Forrester intends to update vendor evaluations regularly as product
capabilities and vendor strategies evolve.

Integrity Policy
All of Forrester’s research, including Forrester Wave evaluations, is conducted according to our Integrity
Policy. For more information, go to http://www.forrester.com/marketing/policies/integrity-policy.html.

ENDNOTES
1
Source: Forrsights Hardware Survey, Q3 2012.

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