What is “market leadership? There is no shortage of vendors claiming to be #1 in something. Such a simple question but so often misinterpreted.
Many customers and vendors believe that the vendor placed in the highest and farthest to the right position of the Gartner Magic Quadrant report is the “leader” of that market. But that's only one data point .
Another key measurement point is market share. In fact, BusinessDictionary.com defines market leadership this way:
“[A] brand, product, or firm that has the largest percentage of total sales revenue (the market share) of a market.”
Gartner also reports that the world’s economy diverts $4.3B USD every year in their report Market Share: Storage Management Software, Worldwide, 2012, (May 2013). Symantec backup software accounts for 32.2% of the total and I know that the NetBackup product makes up 65% of that Symantec slice.
Thus:
- NetBackup makes up 21% of the overall market, the leadership position as measured by revenue
- EMC has a combined 17.6% share across three separate products: Avamar, Networker, and Data Domain
- IBM's TSM is just a hair behind with 17.5%
- CommVault and HP are nearly the same, each less than 10%
A third data point is buyer behavior. Who are the companies channeling these funds into Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software and where are they placing their trust?
The biggest revenue generators in the world are tracked on the Global Fortune 100 list. The data centers of these companies are among the largest and most complex in the world. It’s obvious why features like “scalability”, “heterogeneity”, and “reliability” would be so important in these kinds of environments.
The Gartner market share statistics imply that 32 of the top 100 would be NetBackup customers. But in fact, an astonishing 80 of them select Symantec to protect their data.
And how about the top 10 companies in the world? How many of them put their trust in Symantec to protect the largest slice of the global private sector revenue pie?
Every single one of them. When it comes down to it, the largest organizations with the most at stake trust NetBackup.
Why is this? What is it about the product that drives that kind of loyalty? Is it because we’ve won more Best of VMworld Awards for Data Protection and Business Continuity than any other vendor? Is it because we introduced the NetBackup Appliances, which have taken the purpose-built backup appliance market by storm and are currently the fastest growing product in that market?
The truth is probably much simpler. Customers choose NetBackup because it works. And of all the data points, we think customer trust is the truest definition of leadership.
