There's a saying when the big picture gets drowned out by the minutiae that "you can't see the forest because of all the trees." Marketers always struggle with this. We constanly ask ourselves if a single situation, or a cluster of similar situations indicates a new trend or threatens derail our plans. Sometimes we just have to bet on a hunch and over time it turns out that we were right.
I hold that backup is a platform, not an application and recovery should be delivered with a single lever, not a series of knobs. Backup Exec 2012 was redesigned around this theory and we included new capabilities to handle physical, virtual and legacy variables. Since BE is used more often than any other product in the world to do these kinds of tasks, it's a very large forest. Two things happened today that really clarified the trees for us.
First, today we had Matt Stephenson and Michael Krutikov in front of a live online SpiceWorks audience for an hour, taking questions and sharing our thoughts directly with participants. Over 350 Spiceheads interacted with us live and the comment stream is a firehose of excited users asking best practice questions around pushing their mixed environments. The recording is up if you want to take a look and in the forst 48 hours passed 60,000 views.
Secondly, today Frank Ohlhorst at eWEEK published a review on Backup Exec 2012. It's a superb validation from an unbiased 3rd party. In Frank's review, he says "I found that Symantec was dead-on with their claims and that BE2012 was indeed able to quickly recover complete servers, both physical and virtual in a matter of minutes." He concludes with "...offers a new concept in backup execution, which combines physical and virtual disaster recovery with ease of use and reliability."
It's really exciting to see such a clearly positive endorsement of our strategic we're taking. Of course, we didn't get everything perfect, but the forest is steadily coming into focus.
