According to a new IDC report a whole lot of you do. In fact, you’re deploying purpose-built backup appliances (PBBAs) far faster than market researchers had forecast and industry pundits ever thought you would. And the numbers are impressive indeed – even to those of us in the business.
Just look at IDC’s latest data:
- Year-over-year revenue growth increased from $2.1B (24.4%) to $2.8B (65.5%).
- CAGR increased from 16.6% to 25.6%.
Wowsa! Changes in today’s data center – notably, the explosion of virtualization, the ramp-up to the cloud and even expectations around big data demands – are changing the way we think about backup and recovery and, more importantly, the purchasing decisions we’re making.
Why is PBBA growing faster than any other backup category? IDC says it’s because PBBAs improve backup window time, provide faster restore and enable seamless integration with existing backup applications. Customers and other industry analyst firms cite a variety of business and technology benefits, including continual and uninterruptable business processes, lower infrastructure costs, reduced backup windows, more scalable virtual server protection and consistent backups.
How long will this trend continue? IDC believes it will continue for the foreseeable future as organizations continue to take advantage of the PBBA’s rich feature-sets, again particularly for virtual server protection, rapid recovery and data deduplication.
What choices do you have? The market abounds with options. Over the past four months, Stephen Manley, EMC’s backup recovery systems CTO and TBW blogger, has been writing on this subject. His multi-part blog series – Choices Matter: Don’t Get Caught with Your Pants on the Ground – puts industry research, like IDC’s, in context. The series examines key technologies (versioned replication) you should be looking into if you’re not already and shares customer stories – the good, the bad and the ugly. A must read if you’ve got PBBA or are just considering it.
Oh, and did I mention, EMC, with 62.0% of the $1.2 billion spent on PBBA solutions and 63.5% of the raw TBs shipped, is the clear market leader in the PBBA market? A shameless plug, I know. But if you translate these numbers into market share, we’ve got more than 3x the share of our nearest competitor, and that means something.
