CA: Backup in the clouds

Coinciding with the publication yesterday of a survey that says channel firms are currently focusing on the “low-hanging fruit” of cloud-based storage, backup and recovery, CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) is turning its attention to the cloud with the latest version of its ARCserve family of backup and disaster recovery products.

CA says this latest version (ARCserve r16) stands out as it offers “full hybrid data protection” for the physical, virtualised, private and public cloud environments through four products – ARCserve Backup, Replication, High Availability and Disk-to-Disk.

“r16 covers pretty much all platforms; we have local bare metal recovery right through to remote high availability cloud-connected disaster recovery solutions with this release,” says Chris Ross, vice president EMEA &Asia-Pacific, CA Technologies Data Management CSU (pictured).

A key message around the release is that of cloud integration. According to Ross, “We’re seeing how compelling the cloud is becoming as part of an overall disaster recovery plan. A large percentage of companies…intend to have the cloud as part of their disaster protection plan in the coming years.”

ARCserve r16 provides access to hybrid cloud storage, so customers can use public and private cloud services such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Windows Azure and Eucalyptus, for remote, off-site data protection, archiving and failover. It also allows customers to use Amazon EC2 as their disaster recovery platform if there’s a problem with their on-premise infrastructure.

“It’s easy to position for the channel,” says Ross, who adds that the vendor is continuing with its managed capability licensing. This means the customer can purchase multiple data protection functionalities with a single licence, based on the total amount of data they need to protect. CA believes this also makes it easier for channel partners to price and package data protection and solutions to their customers.

“The way end users want to consume software is changing,” he continues. “If you look at the data protection market overall, the perpetual licence business is only growing slightly, but the SaaS or managed service-based data protection market is growing at a high double digit. r16 has brought some new technology to market to enable the partner to move into a more managed service type environment.”

Additionally, Ross says the “significant changes” the vendor has made over the last two years to how it supports the channel has left it “feeling very happy” with where its data protection business is heading.

“We continue to offer the richest margins available in our industry,” says Ross, citing “one of the most aggressive deal registration programmes in the market.” If a partner first registers, then closes a deal, they are guaranteed up to a 40 percent margin on the sale, he explains. “Nobody else in the market is enabling partners to earn that level of margin today.”