There is an interesting dynamic in the business world - when you are not the leader in a category or segment you go out of your way to make some leadership claim. And when you are the leader making strong statements about this position is often perceived as boasting.
Data Domain is the leader in dedupe disk-to-disk (D2D) backup - they just don't say it often or loud enough. Beyond the marketing impact of this reality there is great value to the customer. Data Domain has the largest number of installs with years of field experience. In the IT infrastructure world quantity is quality - because the market will throw anything and everything at you. The more your product is in production environments the higher quality it will be - and there will be fewer unknown variables because you've been exposed to more and more of them. Additionally, Data Domain has built an organization and ecosystem that understands the solutions and issues for D2D backup - it is their core competency.
Steve Duplessie, senior analyst for the Enterprise Strategy Group blogged about IT leadership recently, Steve states "The Blue Ocean concept is absolutely true, yet 90% of all companies will spend far too much time and effort attempting to compete in a market with an established (perceived or real) leader..."
Data Domain went after a Blue Ocean opportunity and has become the leader - and others are following in order to compete. According to Steve and his years of observing IT markets - it is very unlikely that anyone will dislodge the leader. This isn't his opinion but an analysis based on historical trends.
EMC is the one big player going after this market in earnest with three different products (which will confuse the market and themselves) and they will make progress because they are a giant. But I submit that they will continue to face the issues that Duplessie points out in his blog - the leader creates the Blue Ocean (Data Domain) and the number two guy started the race too late and will never catch up.
The number two guy tends to throw mud and go on the attack. An EMC blogger did this recently comparing Data Domain and Avamar. The blog is overly biased trying to bash Data Domain and shine a bright light on Avamar. But look at the comments posted and you will see end users attacking the content of the blog because it is - well - ridiculous.
I just had a conversation with a big EMC customer that went with Data Domain after giving careful consideration to everything that EMC had to offer. Even though EMC is a strategic partner they didn't want to go with Avamar or CDL:
"We didn't believe in the VTL paradigm. We were really looking for stuff that was native NAS, either CIFS or NFS protocol, so to keep it "simple stupid" kind of mentality. And there's a lot of vendors that have since integrated even with Data Domain with proprietary APIs to get a better performance out of the Data Domain. But the tradeoff there is kind of performance versus openness. So we looked at Avamar with EMC. They had just acquired them about the time we were looking at Data Domain. We looked at a few others, but they really weren't big name players. We searched out there and we went to people that we typically do business with. The real issue of the Avamar solution was that it was a complete replacement rather than an augmentation of the existing environment.
Data Domain just stepped in and instead of tape, now you're writing to a disk-based target. And it was fairly easy to set up, because it's CIFS and NFS. Avamar was 'rip and replace' both the software and the hardware. They're a combined platform. So [Avamar] was a much more unilateral replacement if we wanted to go there. We thought Data Domain was less invasive in the environment at the time."
This is common sense thinking that is the majority view. That doesn't mean that everyone will go
down this path - there are always exceptions.
From an end users perspective Data Domain is the leading solution and the product works extremely well, there are thousands and thousands of happy customers, it is easy to install and the value is quantifiable. What other IT products can you say that about?
Another big false negative that competitors will say about Data Domain is that it is a one trick pony. So was EMC for years with the Symmetrix and that strategy made them billions of dollars. Eventually they added more products to their portfolio but it took years. NetApp is still fundamentally a single product company and that has done extremely well for them. And even though EMC claims they are the number one NAS vendor (nod, nod, wink, wink) we all know that the real leader is NetApp. I predict they will make the same claim against Data Domain going forward. And Data Domain, just like NetApp, has an extremely healthy business with impressive growth rates and high margin products - that is clear to measure.
I have a very different view than the naysayers - Data Domain has the leading product with no clear and strong competitors in a market that has endless opportunity. Pretty much every company has budget for backup devices and it is core to their operations. This is a multiple billion dollar market and Data Domain is the leader. Additionally, you will see more and more customers using the same Data Domain appliances for archival storage. This is a powerful value proposition - using the same system for backup and archive and the combined dedupe ratios are compelling and hard to beat.
The leader's dilemma is that every competitor will come gunning for you - but that is okay - because they invariably miss.
Comments