Gartner’s latest Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions magic quadrant kicks Acronis out of the supplier list and has Veeam strengthening its position in the leaders quadrant with the highest Ability to Execute ranking.
A comparison with last year’s edition of this MQ shows that, in the Leaders’ quadrant, Dell falls back in completeness of vision while Veeam improves on that axis to join a close-packed, arrow head-like leading group alongside Commvault, Rubrik, Cohesity and Veritas. (Magic quadrant details and features are explained in a bootnote below.)
There are no Challenger suppliers listed. Arcserve was the sole challenger in 2023 but it has been demoted in Ability to Execute terms and is now a niche player. In the Niche Players quadrant Acronis exits the MQ completely, because, the report says: “its focus on prioritizing MSPs and edge/endpoint device workloads resulted in its inability to meet the inclusion criteria.” This leaves Arcserve, Unitrends, Microsoft and OpenText in the Niche Players’ box. As before, Druva, HYCU and IBM are the Visionaries, with IBM suffering a worse Completeness of Vision rating compared to 2023.
The Gartner report writers make some strategic planning assumptions:
- By 2028, 75 percent of enterprises will use a common solution for backup and recovery of data residing on-premises and in cloud infrastructure, compared with 20 percent in 2024.
- By 2028, 75 percent of enterprises will prioritize backup of SaaS applications as a critical requirement, compared with 15 percent in 2024.
- By 2028, 90 percent of enterprise backup and recovery products will include embedded technology to detect and identify cyberthreats, compared with fewer than 45 percent in 2024.
- By 2028, 75 percent of large enterprises will adopt backup as a service (BaaS), alongside on-premises tools, to back up cloud and on-premises workloads, compared with 15 percent in 2024.
- By 2028, 75 percent of enterprise backup and recovery products will integrate generative AI (GenAI) to improve management and support operations, compared with fewer than 5 percent in 2024.
This is more or less an instruction to suppliers to put these features, if missing, on their development roadmaps.
A big question for us is: which of the three visionaries will make the jump into the leader’s box?
The report has detailed strengths and cautions note on each supplier and you can download a copy of this MQ from HYCU’s website (registration required).
Bootnote
The “Magic Quadrant” is a 2D space defined by axes labelled “Ability To Execute” and “Completeness of Vision”, and split into four squares tagged “Visionaries” and “Niche Players” at the bottom, and “Challengers” and “Leaders” at the top. The best placed vendors are in the top right Leaders box and with a balance between execution ability and vision completion. The nearer they are to the top right corner of that box the better.
