Darrell Riddle, Director Product Management, Symantec, says, "Virtualization of servers is the next big thing in the servers market. IDC predicts that the numbers are bound to increase from 22 percent to 45 percent in the next year or so. Everyone right from Microsoft with its Hyper-V to VMware is looking at Virtualization of servers as the next big thing. One has to agree that if Microsoft is getting into it, it is bound to become a mass thing pretty soon, as Microsoft's reach-and-push market strategy is known to everyone. We want to make sure that when virtualization becomes the big thing, we are a part of it. We believe in making products that are a bit futuristic in nature and this one is no different.
"The new release of Backup Exec 12.5 and Backup Exec System Recovery 8.5 allows organizations to easily protect their data and systems in a physical and virtual environment through one simplified solution."
Ajay Verma, Director Channel and Alliances, Symantec India, says, "Virtualization as a concept is till now taken up only by the big enterprises. It is still at an early-adopter stage, which is our big enterprise. However, like every other product, this is also on the verge of transcending from being a product for early adopters to a mass product. We as a company want to make sure that we are there well before time and are a known product in the market when the rush of virtualization hits it."
"India is one of the top three markets for all our products. However, we do prioritize markets according to the products. For this product, we think India is one of the biggest markets. This product is aimed at the SMB and the SME section, where the players are ready to spend a little extra on a product that helps them save money and time in the future.
"Virtualization as a concept is definitely going to catch their attention as it saves money as you are reducing the number of servers, it saves energy so it's also green and helps better management as now you have just four severs in place of 10. And there are close to two million SMB's here and thousands are being created on a daily basis. So, for this product India is surely a very big market," said Riddle.
Backup Exec reduces complexity by enabling users to backup an unlimited number of guest machines within a VMware ESX or Microsoft Hyper-V host environment to disk or tape from a single agent.
The major focus of Symantec for this product is to create awareness about virtualization, create a market for the same in the SMB sector and push this concept along with their product through the channel partners by enabling and educating them. Riddle is therefore here in India himself to train the channel partners, to create awareness as well as confidence among its partners. "I am down here myself to give face-to-face training to the top 50-60 partners in all the major cities of the country. Apart from this, we are also giving out white papers and materials on 'what to talk about this product to the customer' to our partners online. We are also having a lot of training programs for our partners."
According to Ajay Verma, the biggest challenge they are facing as far as channel partners are concerned is to get them to their online portal and make them read and get certified online. "We are well aware that online material does not really appeal to the partners and is therefore of not any real use in the end. That is why we have training programs in places like Ludhiana, Indore, etc. We are trying our best to come over this problem and conduct more training camps in Tier II and III cities, giving hands-on training to our partners."
Speaking about the problems that their partners are facing, Verma says, "In this period of economic uncertainty, the biggest challenge for our partners is 'How to keep their customers spending money on products?' Educating the customer about the new trends, creating new markets, capturing the existing ones and attrition are some of the big challenges."
The latest release of the Backup Exec family provides new integration to support the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 portfolio, including Windows Small Business Server 2008, Windows Essential Business Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008. Symantec also plans to come up with Backup Exec Infrastructure Manager 12.5 which will have a web-based interface to allow convenient access and easy management of Backup Exec infrastructure from any location and presents the IT administrator with a graphical map of their entire Backup Exec deployment. This product will be launched in the fall of 2008.