SMBs Praise Centralized Backup

When Veritas Software Corp. (Nasdaq: VRTS) announced new capabilities in its Backup Exec product this week (see Veritas Announces New Software), customer testimonials came largely from small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). And centralized backup, the ability to back up remote-site data from a central console, was the key feature they praised.

"We want to take the local office out of the picture and centralize backup," says Ralph Barber, CIO of international law firm Holland & Knight LLP. He says his firm, which has grown from several hundred to over 4,000 employees in just a couple of years, saw "immediate savings" by piloting Veritas's new Backup Exec 10.0 this December. The new version does centralized backup that replaces the site-by-site backup the 30-site firm used to conduct.

Barber isn't alone in lauding centralized backup as a key feature for SMBs. Another Veritas customer, Adam L. Eiseman, CEO of The Lloyd Group, an integrator and consultancy specializing in basic IT solutions for SMBs, says firms with fewer than 500 users are characterized by rapid growth and low IT budgets.

"They are growing, and the cost of technology hasn't come down," he says. Customers want to keep IT under centralized control even as they increase the scale of their technology base. Clearly, having a way to control backups for multiple sites from one data center or network operations center (NOC) fits the bill.

As longtime Veritas customers, neither Barber nor Eiseman question why it took Veritas so long to deliver centralized backup, but one industry source, who asked not to be named, says some new features in Backup Exec, including centralized backup, are new only to Veritas.