Gartner Magic Quadrant Drama – Stay Calm and Look to the Clouds for Your Enterprise File Backup Needs

If you haven’t been following the drama in the enterprise file Backup and Recovery category these past few weeks, I will catch you up. Last week, Gartner Group published their Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions Magic Quadrant and a few vendors publicly complained about their position. Gartner is one of the most influential 3rd party groups assisting businesses with their IT purchases and the Magic Quadrant is a summary of the position of the top vendors in a category. It is also what most B2B software marketers lose a lot of sleep over. And despite the chatter out there today, I can tell you one thing for certain: The Magic Quadrant is not ‘pay to play.’

Why the Magic Quadrants?

I have been lucky to work with Gartner for many years. My early career memories include taking the Amtrak train to Stamford for briefings. I have worked on many Magic Quadrant submissions and the businesses I’ve been involved with have been leaders and not quite leaders. I have made friends with analysts and have hired a few to work on my team over the years. These quadrants are not easy, and companies don’t buy their way to a better position. The authors of these reports put a ton of work into them and most will tell you they are not their favorite thing to do. No one is ever happy except the one vendor with the highest score. Gartner posted a good blog on the process for these MQ’s if interested. Lastly, if you don’t like the inclusion criteria don’t participate!

Supporting the Visionaries

I’m confused why vendors would be upset with being placed in the ‘Visionary’ category especially in a space like Data Center Backup that is ripe for disruption. This is a market that has been around for many years. In a legacy market, you will have leaders who have been in the space since the beginning, but the concept of having next generation visionaries is a good thing. Customers are looking for new ways to solve their problems and the savvy IT professional will realize that often the best solutions – especially in a legacy market – are not the so-called ‘leaders’ but the up and comers. These companies are either not included in the Quadrant at all because they don’t fit the criteria, or they earn a spot in the Visionaries category.

Nasuni is a perfect example of this. We are lucky to be in the crossroads of two Magic Quadrants that have been published in the past 2 weeks. The first is the ‘Distributed File Systems and Object Storage’ and the second is ‘Data Center Backup’. Nasuni was not included in either report even though we squarely play in each market. Are we upset? No way. We are disrupting these markets with a cloud-based approach. We do not fit the typical ‘guardrails’ for these categories and are proud of it.

Breaking Down the Reports

Let’s take the Distributed File Systems and Object Storage report. This report discusses on-premises file systems and object storage. We don’t do on-prem, so we are not included. Did I get many requests from our sales team and partner channel wondering why we are not in the quadrant with the vendors we are replacing every day? Of course, I did! I am proud that we are not in this Quadrant because we don’t believe in building on premises file systems. Our vision is to replace the legacy NAS market with our cloud-based approach. As our partner AWS likes to say ‘Friends Don’t Let Friends Build Data Centers’.

The same goes for the Backup & Recovery Quadrant. We are not traditionally seen as a backup or recovery provider but one of the key benefits of moving your file system to the cloud is that backup and recovery is ‘built-in.’ No more deploying and managing backup software (that usually doesn’t work for files) for your files. I have spoken with dozens of customers over the past few months and when asked what their favorite thing about a cloud-based file system is, the answer is unanimous: No More Backups! When you have a continuously versioning file system that automatically stores file changes as they occur directly in cloud storage, you actually have a better solution than traditional backup. Please check out this video to see the next generation of cloud-based file backup.

Don’t Just Take My Word for It

“Taking away the need to do traditional tape backups was very important. The Nasuni Continuous File Versioning technology enables us to protect data in a consistent way globally. We’ve had offices go offline because of natural disasters in the past, and they were unable to work for over a week. Their RPOs and RTOs were inconsistent and often inadequate. Now, we can get files back quickly to very recent restore points.”

– Don Pointing, Global Technology Director, TBWA (Read the TBWA Case Study)

We have global brands like Western Digital, Electronic Arts, Caterpillar, Omnicom Group and many others that partnered with us because they were frustrated by the cost and inefficiencies of legacy NAS infrastructures. Nasuni offers a file services platform built for the cloud. Powered by the world’s only global file system, Nasuni consolidates NAS silos, delivering infinite scale, built-in backup, global file sharing, and local file server performance – at 1/2 the cost of traditional file infrastructures.

So please do your own research and include Gartner in that research. And if you are ready for a modern cloud-based approach to file systems and backup, please talk to us. As we say at Nasuni, ‘Stay Calm and Move Your NAS to the Cloud’.