LAS VEGAS — What had started out as a very low-key CA World has turned into a he said/she said war of words between Computer Associates International Inc. and Veritas Software Corp.
It
all started when Veritas issued a press release this week about an independent survey done by NFO Prognostics, a market research company based in Palo Alto, Calif. The NFO survey found that 100 per cent of Veritas customers who switched from CA ARCServe backup software were satisfied with their decision. No other details about the NFO survey, such as the number of respondents, could be found at press time.
David Liff, regional vice-president brand management for storage at CA, confirmed he read the press release and was not impressed with his competitor’s tactics.
“You should never trash you competitor in public because inevitably it can come back to hurt you later on,”” Liff said. “”They recognize us and BrightStor as the superior product and they know what we were doing here this week (at CA World) and it was weak.”
George Kafkarkou, senior vice-president of worldwide channels operation for CA, was more blunt.
“Look, we admit it: We took our eye off the ball three years with ARCServe backup,”” he said. “”We were No. 1 and now we are not No. 1. During that time we heard nothing from our competitors and now we are. We are delivering on all solutions, unlike Veritas. That is why we are getting this kind of attention from our friends,” he said.
The Veritas attack came on the heels of CA’s pre-announcement of BrightStor ARCServe backup Version 10. Version 10 will include advanced application disaster recovery along with several other new features.
ARCServe disaster recovery is expected to reduce the time taken to recover Windows from a catastrophe or failure.
“The feedback from our channel was that disasters usually happen at 3 a.m. with now support or channel partners around. This will allow hands-free rapid recovery from bare metal to application to use. This is going to be industry leading,” Liff said of the new disaster recovery feature in ARCServe.
Other new features include simultaneous language support and integration of BrightStor’s enterprise backup, storage resource manager, portal and ETrust anti-virus.
Liff added that Version 10 will also have something called Single Instance Store, which will enable companies to store system messages that are sent to 100 people to be backed up once.
Version 10 of BrightStor ARCServe backup will be available to the channel in Q4 of this year.
CA also released BrightStor Storage Assessment Pack and BrightStor SAN Life Cycle Management Starter Pack. This rollout, Kafkarkou said, is intended to jump-start Premier partner’s enterprise storage initiatives.
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