CA partner survey bigs-up recovery management

Preparing for every eventuality: Almost half of CA's resellers are expecting more demand for recovery management solutions this year

CA partners have high hopes for the recovery management market this year, according to its latest channel survey.

The software giant questioned more than 900 partners in 17 EMEA countries including the UK, and 94 per cent of respondents claimed that they anticipated spending on recovery solutions – including backup, business continuity and disaster recovery – in 2010 will be at least equal to 2009 levels.

Interestingly, 41 per cent expect expenditure to be higher than last year.

Chris Ross, EMEA and Asia Pacific vice president for CA’s Recovery Management and Data Modelling business unit, said: “As businesses emerge from the recession, data and recovery management remains a top IT priority.

“We see that companies are faced with increasingly complex IT environments to guard and as a result are looking for new ways of meeting these growing data protection needs. This represents a huge business opportunity for our channel partners across Europe,” he added.

CA’s latest study also looked at cloud computing and utility IT services, and some 57 per cent of partners claimed their customers were interested in cloud storage, or backup-as-a-service, as an option for their storage requirements.

A further 76 per cent felt data deduplication was another top opportunity for the channel this year.

Ross added: “Overall the research is extremely positive for the recovery management industry. Because our partners are close to the issues that matter to European business, it provides a good indication of the trends in this technology area.

“It is clear that there are some exciting revenue opportunities for the channel to capitalise on. CA is welcoming new recovery management resellers to its partner community and is making it easy for them to further develop their business reach and increase revenues.”

In separate research, CA released findings of a commissioned study carried out by Forrester Consulting, that examined the impact, challenges and requirements of operating virtualised IT environments.

The study questioned 257 virtualisation decision makers in the US, UK, France, Germany and Japan, with three key findings.

First, moving to internal clouds requires changes to processes and automation management, comprehensive domain coverage is critical and a top-down, application-centric approach is needed.

Roger Pilc, corporate senior vice president of virtualisation and service automation at CA, said: “The study results reflect CA’s belief that management is the key to unlocking the business value of virtualisation.

“Comprehensive, enterprise-class management and automation can increase IT agility, reduce costs, improve service quality and reduce risks in physical, virtual and cloud computing environments,” he said.