Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions

Published 20 July 2020 - ID G00464149 - 45 min read

The move toward public cloud, heightened concerns over ransomware, and
complexities associated with backup and data management are forcing I&O
leaders to rearchitect their backup infrastructure and explore alternative solutions.
This research provides analyses of backup and recovery vendors.

Market Definition/Description

Data center backup and recovery solutions are designed to capture a point-in-time
copy (backup) of an enterprise workload and write the data out to a secondary
storage device for the purpose of recovering this data in the future.

The core functionalities of a backup and recovery solution are to:

 Back up and recover operating systems, files, databases, and applications

in both physical and virtual environments in the data center.

 Assign backup and retention policies that align with the organization’s
recovery objectives.

 Report success and failure of backup/recovery tasks.

Additional capabilities that can be provided by the solution are to:

 Create a second backup copy of on-premises backup data in the public

cloud, and tier backup data to public cloud.

 Protect public cloud IaaS, PaaS and SaaS workloads.

 Protect remote sites.

Magic Quadrant

Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions
Source: Gartner (July 2020)

Vendor Strengths and Cautions

Acronis

Acronis is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant; in the last iteration of this research, it
was a Niche Player. Its Cyber Backup platform focuses on providing an integrated
data protection and security solution that covers on-premises, cloud and edge
environments. Its operations are geographically diversified, and a majority of its
clients tend to be in the midmarket segment. In 2019, Acronis announced a
disaster-recovery-as-a-service offering as a part of the Acronis Cyber Cloud for
 Enterprise portfolio. It further improved the Cyber Backup platform by introducing
new security capabilities and enhancing its virtual machine (VM) backup
capabilities.

Strengths

 Vertical industry focus — Acronis has data protection solutions specifically

targeted at automotive, healthcare, energy and government verticals as a result of
joint development efforts with OEMs and independent software vendors (ISVs) in
these verticals.

 Differentiated cybersecurity capabilities — Acronis’ ransomware protection

capabilities and its ability to verify the authenticity and recoverability of backup
copies strongly complement its backup capabilities.

 Product localization — Acronis products and documentation are localized in

25 languages, the highest number among all vendors evaluated in this research.

Cautions

 Database support — Acronis’ backup and recovery capabilities for

databases such as Oracle Database, Microsoft SQL, SAP HANA and NoSQL
databases are not comprehensive and lag competition.

 Widening capability gap — Acronis trails competition in its ability to provide

comprehensive data protection capabilities for public cloud, hyperconverged
infrastructure (HCI) and network-attached storage (NAS) environments.

 Ecosystem integration — Acronis has limited integration with hardware

snapshots from storage array vendors and lacks direct integration with third-party
IT service management (ITSM) and IT monitoring tools.

Actifio

Actifio is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant; in the last iteration of this research, it
was a Visionary. Its product, Actifio Sky, is mainly focused on providing data
protection and copy data management capabilities for virtual machines and large
databases, both on-premises and in a wide variety of public clouds. Its operations
are mainly focused in the North American market, and its clients tend to be in the
large enterprise segment. In 2019, Actifio announced the CDX backup appliance, a
 two-node high availability (HA) appliance based on Virtual Data Pipeline (VDP)
software designed for smaller backup environments. In December 2019, it
announced Actifio 10c, a major software update that introduced several key
features, notably the “mount and migrate” feature for efficient database and VM
recovery, automated disaster recovery (DR) orchestration and cloud VM snapshot
management.

Strengths

 Deployment flexibility — Actifio’s platform can be deployed as a virtual

appliance (Actifio Sky) or a bare-metal appliance (CDX), or deployed and
consumed as a SaaS offering (Actifio GO) in all leading public cloud providers —
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

 Extensive database support and quick recovery — Actifio provides instant

recovery capabilities via its “mount and recover” feature for all major databases
including IBM Db2, Oracle Database, Microsoft SQL and SAP HANA, both in on-
premises and public cloud environments. This is particularly useful in environments
with several large databases.

 Low cloud backup/recovery costs — The ability to directly mount data from
object storage without rehydrating to block storage, efficient storage tiering and a
multitude of other features ensure lower operational costs, recovery point objective
(RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) for “backup to cloud” and “backup in
cloud” use cases.

Cautions

 Limited presence outside North America — Actifio has limited direct and
indirect presence outside North America, relying on a relatively small network of
partners alongside OEM relationships with Dell and IBM. This impedes overall
customer experience during the presales cycle and results in suboptimal account
management in these regions.

 High acquisition and maintenance costs — The list price for software
licenses and annual maintenance is higher than most vendors evaluated in this
research.
 No tape support — Lack of native integration with tape libraries and drives
limits adoption in environments where users rely on tape as the primary media for
short-term operational recovery or long-term backup retention.

Arcserve

Arcserve did not respond to requests for supplemental information. Gartner’s

analysis is therefore based on other credible sources, including Gartner client
inquiries, Gartner Peer Insights, press releases from Arcserve and technical
documentation available on Arcserve’s website.

Arcserve is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant; in the last iteration of this
research, it was a Niche Player. Arcserve’s backup portfolio includes: Arcserve
Unified Data Protection (UDP); Arcserve Backup for tape support; Arcserve
Appliances Secured by Sophos; Arcserve Cloud Direct; and Arcserve UDP Cloud
Hybrid Secured by Sophos for cloud-based backup, off-site retention and DR. It
also includes Arcserve Cloud Backup for Office 365 Secured by Sophos for cloud-
to-cloud protection of Microsoft Office 365 email, files and SharePoint sites.
Arcserve’s operations are geographically diversified and most of its clients are in
the midmarket and enterprise segments. In the past year, Arcserve introduced
Arcserve UDP 7.0, which provides support for Nutanix AHV and Microsoft
OneDrive. It also continued to enhance its backup as a service (BaaS) offerings —
Arcserve Cloud Direct and UDP Cloud Hybrid Secured by Sophos.

Strengths

 Breadth of platform support — Arcserve UDP addresses the data protection

requirements of a broad range of operating systems, hypervisors, databases and
public cloud environments.

 Recovery assurance — Arcserve’s recovery assurance capability allows

users to verify the integrity of the backups performed, thus providing additional
levels of data protection.

 Low acquisition cost — Arcserve offered the lowest socket-based license

pricing among all vendors evaluated in the market in 2019.

Cautions
 Tape support — Arcserve customers that require tape support must
separately install Arcserve Backup alongside Arcserve UDP.

 Service and support — Gartner’s Peer Insights survey and client inquiries
indicate that the overall quality of support needs to be improved.

 Ransomware detection and remediation — Arcserve UDP offers limited

capabilities for detecting ransomware attacks on the backup copy and ransomware
recovery and testing.

Cohesity

Cohesity is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant; in the last iteration of this research, it
was a Visionary. Cohesity’s backup product portfolio mainly consists of
DataProtect, which is part of the Cohesity DataPlatform, a scale-out software-
defined platform that consolidates application and backup management. Cohesity’s
operations are mainly focused in North America and Western Europe, and its
clients tend to be in the upper midmarket and enterprise segments. In the past
year, Cohesity announced support for Oracle RAC, SAP HANA, AIX and Active
Directory backup, thus narrowing the overall capability gap in protecting traditional
workloads. It also continued to innovate and deliver capabilities in emerging areas
such as data management and data protection for edge and public cloud
environments. In May 2019, it acquired Imanis Data, which helped further expand
its capabilities to include NoSQL data protection.

Strengths

 Centralized monitoring and management — Cohesity customers can

leverage Helios, a SaaS-based platform that facilitates centralized management of
multiple Cohesity environments. It provides ransomware detection, capacity
management, issue root cause analysis, and case management, as well as search
and compliance capabilities.

 Heterogenous cluster support — A Cohesity cluster can comprise server

nodes from different OEMs, namely Dell, Cisco and Hewlett Packard Enterprise
(HPE), or Cohesity nodes. This provides increased flexibility when customers begin
to scale the system.
 Support experience — Cohesity scores above average in service and
support capabilities. This can be attributed to a combination of superior account
management and the use of its Helios SaaS platform to proactively detect, notify
and remediate issues.

Cautions

 Release cadence and code quality — Cohesity’s frequent major update

cadence to its DataProtect platform has resulted in a relatively high number of
known issues and issues reported by customers, indicating an inadequate
prerelease quality assurance testing process.

 Reporting — Cohesity customers have indicated that Cohesity does not

offer granular-level reporting and that overall the reporting capability needs to be
improved.

 Limited presence in emerging markets — Cohesity has limited direct

presence and a relatively small number of channel partners in emerging markets,
requiring customers to ensure they work with a credible partner and rely on local
references when selecting Cohesity.

Commvault

Commvault is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant; in the last iteration of this research,
it was a Leader. Its backup/recovery portfolio mainly comprises Commvault
Complete Backup & Recovery and Commvault HyperScale; the latter is also sold in
an appliance form factor. Commvault’s operations are geographically diversified
and its clients tend to be in the large enterprise segment. As a part of its expansion
strategy, in October 2019 it announced Commvault Metallic, a backup-as-a-service
offering targeted at the midmarket segment. In September 2019, Commvault
acquired Hedvig, a software-defined storage vendor that addresses multiple
primary and secondary storage requirements. During the past year, Commvault
introduced several new capabilities that addressed data protection requirements in
hybrid cloud, public cloud IaaS and PaaS environments.

Strengths
 Broad ecosystem support — Commvault supports the broadest range of
applications, databases, public cloud environments, OSs and hypervisors, NAS
systems, and primary storage arrays of all the vendors evaluated in this research.

 Cloud-native data protection — A majority of Commvault’s customers

migrating to AWS, Microsoft Azure and other clouds continue to rely on
Commvault’s ability to protect cloud IaaS, PaaS and SaaS workloads. As of March
2020, Commvault protects the largest number of public cloud VM instances among
all vendors evaluated in this research.

 Subscription licensing — Commvault has been able to successfully

transition a significant number of customers from a traditional perpetual-licensing
model to subscription-based licensing. While this resulted in decline in revenue for
Commvault, it aligns well with customer’s aspirations to shift toward convenient
operating expenditure (opex)-based, cloudlike pricing and provides an opportunity
for license consolidation.

Cautions

 Deployment complexity — Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery

requires installation of several components — client interfacing agents, data
movers, an operations console, and a central management and monitoring
console, as well as additional tools for orchestration and search and compliance;
more than most vendors in this research.

 Commvault HyperScale and Red Hat — The HyperScale appliance is built

on Red Hat and not a proprietary file system, thus creating an external dependency
for providing critical file system updates and fixes. This may increase the overall
time to deliver critical OS updates as Commvault is responsible for testing and
delivery of these updates to the customer.

 Commvault HyperScale available as subscription only — Customers,

particularly in the emerging market, government and utilities sectors, often procure
backup solutions as a perpetual license, following a capital expenditure (capex)
model of investment. Since the HyperScale appliance is available only via a
subscription, such customers may have to explore alternative solutions.

Dell Technologies
 Dell Technologies is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant; in the last iteration of this
research, it was a Leader. Its backup and recovery software portfolio mainly
consist of the Data Protection Suite, comprising Avamar, NetWorker and
PowerProtect Data Manager, which was delivered in July 2019. Its appliances
portfolio comprises Integrated Data Protection Appliances, PowerProtect DD
Series Appliances and newly announced PowerProtect X Series Appliances. Dell
Technologies’ operations are geographically diversified, and its clients span the
midmarket and enterprise segments of the market. In the past year, it released two
new updates for NetWorker and Avamar that included enhancements to the GUI,
deeper integration with VMware and three new updates for PowerProtect Data
Manager, demonstrating investment across all three backup and recovery software
products.

Strengths

 Data reduction efficiency — PowerProtect DD in combination with Data

Protection Suite provides data reduction ratios that are higher than most vendors
evaluated in this research. This reduces overall storage consumption and costs.

 Product quality — Updates to Avamar and NetWorker and the newly

announced PowerProtect Data Manager, collectively, had the lowest number of
issues reported by customers, and fewer known product issues at the time of
release, which indicates a strong focus on product quality.

 Global presence — Dell Technologies has a strong direct and indirect sales
and support presence via a large network of channel partners in both mature and
emerging markets.

Cautions

 Public cloud — With multiple products that address cloud-native data

protection requirements — Avamar Virtual Edition, PowerProtect DD Virtual
Edition, NetWorker Virtual Edition and PowerProtect Cloud Snapshot Manager,
Dell Technologies extends the same level of complexity and overlap associated
with its on-premises solutions into the public cloud.
 Management complexity — A unified monitoring and management
experience covering both on-premises and public cloud environments is work in
progress

 High maintenance costs — Gartner client interactions demonstrate that

existing Dell Technologies Data Protection Suite customers continue to express
concerns regarding high annual maintenance fees.

IBM

IBM is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant; in the last iteration of this research, it was
a Leader. Its Spectrum Protect portfolio consists of Spectrum Protect, Spectrum
Protect Plus and Spectrum Copy Data Management that together address data
protection and reuse requirements for a broad range of applications. IBM’s
operations are geographically diversified, and its clients tend to be in the large
enterprise segment of the market. In the past year, it introduced several key
features in Spectrum Protect Plus — support for Microsoft Exchange Online and
OneDrive, MongoDB, and VMware Cloud on AWS, and support for containers.

Strengths

 Licensing models — Spectrum Protect Suite is priced at convenient per-

back-end-TB pricing, reducing overall total cost of ownership (TCO).

 Container support — Spectrum Protect Plus protects data in containers

managed by Kubernetes, by integrating with Container Storage Interfaces (CSIs),
which provide the capability to snapshot the persistent volumes associated with the
container.

 Global presence — IBM has a strong direct and indirect presence via a
large network of channel partners in both mature and emerging markets.

Cautions

 Integration with public cloud snapshots — Spectrum Protect Suite does not
integrate with public cloud snapshot APIs provided by Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (Amazon EC2), Microsoft Azure VMs or Google Compute Engine (GCE).

 Dependency on third-party vendors — IBM depends on third-party vendors

to address backup requirements for SharePoint, some NoSQL databases, Nutanix
 AHV VMs and bare-metal recovery of operating systems, requiring users to deploy
additional products and thereby increasing management complexity.

 Deployment complexity — Enterprise customers may need to install both

Spectrum Protect and Protect Plus to ensure complete data protection
requirements are addressed. Product consolidation and efforts toward unified
management remain largely works in progress.

Rubrik

Rubrik is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant; in the last iteration of this research, it
was a Visionary. Rubrik’s product portfolio mainly consists of Rubrik Cloud Data
Management (RCDM), its core backup platform; Polaris, a SaaS-based platform
that provides centralized visibility and management and leverages metadata to
provide ransomware remediation and data classification; and Mosaic for protection
of NoSQL workloads. Rubrik’s operations are geographically diverse, and its
clients are mainly in the large enterprise segment of the market. In 2019, it further
augmented Polaris’ capabilities to support public cloud IaaS and SaaS data
protection requirements. It released two major updates to RCDM — 5.1 and 5.1.1
— that introduced native continuous data protection capabilities for VMware and
improved data tiering to Azure, among others. It also introduced Polaris Sonar, a
SaaS-based application for data discovery, classification and reporting.

Strengths

 Scalability — RCDM is based on a proprietary file system that can scale the
appliance both in performance and capacity. Rubrik has reported that it has
multiple customers that protect more than a petabyte of backup data in a single
cluster.

 Ransomware detection and remediation — Polaris Radar monitors the

backup environment for anomalies by applying machine learning models that are
continuously refined, to better align with the changing threat landscape. Backup
data is stored in an immutable format, which increases overall resilience against
ransomware.

 Database recovery — RCDM supports near-instant availability of Microsoft

SQL databases and Oracle Databases through the “live mount” feature, which
reduces the overall recovery time objective.
 Cautions

 Limited integration with storage array snapshots — Rubrik integrates with

hardware snapshot APIs from a limited number of primary storage array vendors.

 Higher operational costs for public cloud application backup — RCDM

requires a four-node VM cluster to be deployed in the public cloud in order to
support granular protection and recovery of applications and databases hosted in
public cloud IaaS. This increases the total cost of ownership of running the backup
infrastructure in the public cloud.

 Weak Active Directory support — RCDM does not support granular recovery
of Active Directory objects. Backup/recovery of the Azure Active Directory
environment is not supported.

Unitrends, a Kaseya Company

Unitrends did not respond to requests for supplemental information. Gartner’s

analysis is therefore based on other credible sources, including Gartner client
inquiries, Gartner Peer Insights, press releases from Unitrends and technical
documentation available on Unitrends’ website.

Unitrends is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant; in the last iteration of this
research, it was a Niche Player. Its data center backup portfolio consists of the
Unitrends Backup Software, Recovery Series Backup Appliance, and Spanning
Backup for Office 365. Its operations are geographically diverse, and its customers
tend to be in the midmarket segment. In March 2019, it introduced the Recovery
Series MAX Appliance, offered in six configurations that address various
requirements of small and midsize business (SMB) and midmarket customers. It
also introduced Helix in early 2020, a SaaS-based management platform that
centrally manages software updates for backup appliances and monitors backup
failures in Windows environments.

Strengths

 Appliance offerings — Recovery Series Generation 8 (Gen 8) appliances,

Recovery Series MAX, and Unitrends virtual appliances collectively address a
broad range of backup capacity and recovery requirements for SMB and
midmarket enterprises at a low cost.
 Long-term retention in public cloud — Unitrends Forever Cloud program
supports long-term retention of data beyond seven years in Unitrends’ managed
cloud infrastructure with no egress charges and with options for performing regular
recovery testing in the cloud.

 Geographic presence — Unitrends has a strong direct and indirect presence

via channel partners in all major geographies.

Cautions

 Database support — Support for backup of Oracle Database and SAP

HANA databases is not granular or comprehensive when compared to other
vendors evaluated in this research.

 Public cloud IaaS support — Unitrends’ backup instance does not integrate
with native snapshot capabilities provided by AWS and Azure. Backing up from on-
premises to public cloud storage is supported for AWS, Google and Rackspace
Technology, but backup copies to Azure require a Unitrends virtual appliance to be
installed in the cloud environment, increasing operational costs.

 Limited integration with storage array snapshots — Unitrends has limited

integration with hardware snapshot capabilities offered by storage vendors.

Veeam

Veeam is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant; in the last iteration of this research, it
was a Leader. Veeam leads with the Veeam Availability Suite, which comprises
Veeam Backup & Replication and Veeam ONE for backup monitoring and
analytics. Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365, Veeam Backup for AWS and
Veeam Availability Orchestrator are add-on products to this suite. Veeam’s
operations are geographically diversified, and its clients tend to be in the
midmarket and enterprise segments. In March 2020, Insight Partners acquired
Veeam; this move is expected to fuel Veeam’s growth in the U.S. market. In 2019,
Veeam made incremental improvements to its cloud tiering, ransomware and NAS
capabilities. After the sale of N2WS, Veeam announced the internally developed
Veeam Backup for AWS in December 2019 to offset the capability gap. It also
announced Nutanix Mine with Veeam, a backup solution based on Nutanix
hyperconverged systems.
 Strengths

 Monitoring, reporting and diagnostics — The Veeam Intelligent Diagnostics

feature detects configuration and performance issues in the customer environment
and provides an option for automatic remediation via Veeam ONE. The diagnostics
engine is updated several times a month with key lessons from Veeam support.

 Licensing portability — The Veeam Universal License option provides

customers with the flexibility to repurpose the same licenses when they switch
hypervisors, migrate from physical to virtual or cloud environments, or from on-
premises to cloud.

 Comprehensive Microsoft Exchange and Office 365 support — Veeam

offers comprehensive backup and granular recovery of on-premises Microsoft
Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint and Office 365 environments that uses a single
pane of glass, also enabling a unified target storage repository for all three
environments.

Cautions

 Deployment complexity — Some customers report that large-scale Veeam

deployments are complex to manage because the deployments typically comprise
several components — multiple backup servers, proxy servers, mount servers,
agents and backup repositories.

 Cloud-native application backup — Veeam does not support application-

consistent backups for applications and databases hosted within virtual machine
instances in AWS and Microsoft Azure, and lacks support for backup of database
as a service (DBaaS) products such as Amazon Relational Database Service
(Amazon RDS) and Azure SQL databases.

 Immutable backup storage — Veeam relies on security capabilities provided

by the storage target or file system software to ensure the primary backup copy is
immutable.

Veritas Technologies

Veritas is a Leader in this year’s Magic Quadrant; in the last iteration of this
research, it was a Leader. Its backup product portfolio mainly consists of the
 NetBackup software, NetBackup Appliances, NetBackup CloudPoint, Flex
Appliance and Backup Exec. Veritas’ operations are geographically diversified, and
its clients tend to be mainly in the large enterprise segment, with some presence in
the midmarket. In 2019, it announced NetBackup 8.2, which included support for
Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) and OpenStack backup. It also announced
the Flex 5150 Hardware Appliance designed for remote office/branch office
(ROBO) and branch office use cases. Veritas also released three updates to its
Backup Exec product line, which included enhancements to ransomware detection
and remediation capabilities, tiering to public cloud and improved support for
VMware and Hyper-V environments. In March 2019, Veritas acquired APTARE,
which specializes in monitoring and analytics for VMs, storage and backup
environments.

Strengths

 Scalability — Veritas has several customers that have deployed NetBackup

to protect multiple petabytes and more than 10,000 virtual machines in a single
environment.

 Cloud-native data protection — NetBackup CloudPoint protects virtual

instances deployed in AWS, Microsoft Azure and GCP by integrating with the
native snapshot capabilities these providers offer, and with plug-ins for Oracle and
Microsoft SQL databases to provide application-consistent backup in AWS and
Microsoft Azure.

 Global presence — Veritas has a strong direct and indirect presence via a
large network of channel partners in both mature and emerging markets.

Cautions

 External dependency for SaaS backup — Data protection requirements for

Office 365, Salesforce and G Suite are delivered via a third-party SaaS backup
vendor.

 Immutable storage — NetBackup’s primary backup copy, with the exception

of tape, is not immutable, thus requiring additional backup copies based on
immutable storage for additional resilience.
 Higher-than-average maintenance costs — Gartner client inquiries indicate
that some NetBackup software license renewals cost more than those of some
vendors evaluated in this research.

Vendors Added and Dropped

We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants as markets
change. As a result of these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic
Quadrant may change over time. A vendor’s appearance in a Magic Quadrant one
year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we have changed our
opinion of that vendor. It may be a reflection of a change in the market and,
therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or of a change of focus by that vendor.

Added

None

Dropped

Micro Focus

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

To qualify for inclusion, vendors need to meet the following criteria at the
commencement of initial research and survey process (5 March 2020):

1. The vendor must meet at least one of the following revenue criteria.
Revenue must be derived solely from its backup and recovery product portfolio.
This revenue should not include revenue generated from implementation
services and managed services:

o The vendor must have generated a revenue (generally accepted

accounting principles [GAAP]) of greater than $50 million from the sale of
product licenses and maintenance over the last four quarters (as of 1 March
2020).

o The vendor must have generated subscription revenue of greater

than $25 million (GAAP) over the past four quarters (as of March 2020).
o The vendor must have generated a revenue (GAAP) of greater than
$25 million from the sale of product licenses and maintenance over the past four
quarters (as of March 2020) combined with a growth rate of 20% or greater from
the prior four quarters.

2. The vendor’s qualifying backup and recovery solution(s) must be sold and
marketed primarily to upper-end midmarket and large enterprise organizations.
Gartner defines the upper-end midmarket as being 500 to 999 employees, and
the large enterprise as being 1,000 employees or greater.

3. The vendor’s qualifying backup and recovery solution must focus on

protecting enterprise environments running in the data center. The data center
can either be a traditional data center or a colocation facility. Protection of cloud-
based IaaS, PaaS and SaaS workloads and remote sites is seen as an
extension to these core capabilities.

4. The vendor must have at least one backup and recovery solution
commercially available for use by enterprises for three calendar years prior to 5
March 2020, i.e., it must have been commercially available at least as early as
March 2017.

5. New products or updates to existing products that were released in the past
12 months must be generally available on or before 5 March 2020 in order to be
considered for evaluation.

6. The vendor should serve an installed base of at least 350 customers within
the market. In addition, at least 250 of the 350 customers must have deployed
the backup solution for a minimum of 100 physical servers or 100 virtual servers
in a single deployment site. This excludes endpoint backups.

7. The vendor must actively sell and support its backup and recovery products
under its own brand name in at least two of the following major regions — North
America, Europe or Asia/Pacific. At least 20% of total revenue and existing
customer count must originate from outside of its major region.

8. The vendor’s solution must support backup and granular restores of data in
both physical and virtualized deployments. It must support at least the following
environments:
o Hypervisor: VMware and Hyper-V via integration with backup
frameworks provided by these hypervisors.

o Applications: Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint via integration with

backup frameworks provided by these applications to ensure application
consistency.

o Operating Systems: Windows and Linux.

o Databases: Oracle Database and Microsoft SQL Server via

integration with their native backup frameworks to ensure database consistency.

9. The product may be sold either as a software-only offering or as an

integrated backup storage appliance (backup application plus backup storage in
a single integrated offering) or both.

Exclusion Criteria

Vendors were excluded from this Magic Quadrant if any of the following criteria
applied:

1. Vendors offering products or solutions that are sourced entirely from a third-
party ISV.

2. Products that serve only as a target or destination for backup but do not
actually perform the backup and restore management function. Examples
include purpose-built deduplication appliances, storage area network (SAN),
NAS or object storage.

3. Vendors that back up directly to the public cloud without storing a local copy
on-premises.

4. Vendors whose main source of product revenue (more than 75% of total
revenue) is from data center hosters and managed service providers.

5. Products or solutions that are designed and mainly positioned as solutions

for backing up endpoints such as laptops, desktops and mobile devices.

6. Products or solutions that are designed and positioned as solutions to back

up remote offices, edge locations and lower-midmarket/SMB environments.
7. Products or solutions designed for homogeneous environments, such as
tools designed to back up only Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware or Red Hat or
containers.

8. Products or solutions designed to back up specific storage or

hyperconverged system vendors.

9. Products that serve primarily as replication and disaster recovery tools.

10. Products that serve primarily for managing snapshot and replication
capabilities of storage arrays.

11. Products that are positioned mainly for copy data management.

12. Products that are mainly true continuous data protection solutions.

Honorable Mentions

Clumio

Clumio is a SaaS-based data protection platform vendor headquartered in Santa

Clara, California. Its backup-as-a-service offering addresses data protection
requirements for AWS, Microsoft Office 365 and VMware environments, all with a
single service.

Clumio was not included in this year’s Magic Quadrant evaluation as it did not meet
the revenue inclusion criteria.

Druva

Druva is a SaaS-based data protection platform vendor headquartered in

Sunnyvale, California. Its backup-as-a-service offering addresses data protection
requirements for workloads and applications on-premises and in the cloud. These
range from VMware, VMware Cloud on AWS, Hyper-V, Oracle, SQL Server, NAS
and file servers to SaaS applications like Microsoft 365, Salesforce and G Suite,
public cloud workloads and endpoint devices.

Druva was not included in this year’s Magic Quadrant evaluation as it did not meet
the criteria for minimum number of enterprise backup customers that deployed the
solution at the scale described in the inclusion criteria.
HYCU

HYCU is a SaaS-based data protection platform vendor headquartered in Boston,

Massachusetts. Through its multicloud data management platform, HYCU Protégé,
it offers backup, migration and disaster recovery capabilities for on-premises virtual
and physical environments as well as public clouds such as Microsoft Azure and
GCP.

HYCU was not included in this year’s Magic Quadrant as it did not meet the
revenue inclusion criteria.

Zerto

Zerto is an IT resilience platform vendor co-headquartered in Boston,

Massachusetts, and Herzliya, Israel. It addresses continuous data
protection, backup, disaster recovery and workload mobility requirements for on-
premises virtual environments and public clouds.

Zerto was not included in this year’s Magic Quadrant as it did not meet the revenue
inclusion criteria.

Evaluation Criteria

Ability to Execute

Gartner analysts evaluate vendors on the quality and efficacy of the processes,
systems, methods or procedures that enable IT provider performance to be
competitive, efficient and effective, and to positively impact revenue, retention and
reputation within Gartner’s view of the market.

Product/Service: This criterion refers to core goods and services that compete in
and or serve the defined market. This includes current product and service
capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills, etc. This can be offered natively or through
OEM agreements/partnerships as defined in the market definition and detailed in
the subcriteria.

Vendors will be assessed mainly on:

 Information gathered as a part of product evaluation in the Critical
Capabilities research.

 Overall product portfolio capability.

 New capability released/products launched during the evaluation period.

 Severity 1 and Severity 2 bugs reported from field in the past 12 months (as
determined by the authors from customer inquiries, publicly available information
and vendor responses).

 Known issues at the time of product release that impact customer

experience (information sourced from product release notes and other technical
documentation).

 Steps taken in the past 12 months to simplify and/or consolidate existing

products for better customer experience.

 Steps taken to integrate products acquired as a result of acquisitions into

the product portfolio.

Overall Viability (Business Unit, Financial, Strategy, Organization):

Financials: Viability includes an assessment of the organization’s overall financial
health, as well as the financial and practical success of the business unit. It views
the likelihood of the organization to continue to offer and invest in the product, as
well as the product position in the current portfolio.

Vendors will be assessed mainly on:

 Overall profitability of the enterprise backup/recovery software portfolio.

 Total revenue from sales of perpetual backup/recovery software licenses in

the four quarters prior to 1 March 2020.

 Total revenue from backup/recovery software maintenance contracts in the

four quarters prior to 1 March 2020.

 Total revenue from backup/recovery software subscription sales from the

four quarters prior to 1 March 2020, as well as prepaid subscriptions for FY21 and
FY22.
 Net new customers in the past 12 months in the defined backup market.

 Financial structure of the organization.

 Current market share in the backup/recovery software market.

 Presence and account wallet share in very large enterprises (more than
10,000 employees/more than $10 billion revenue).

Sales Execution/Pricing: This criterion refers to the organization’s capabilities in all

presales activities and the structure that supports them. This includes deal
management, pricing and negotiation, presales support and the overall
effectiveness of the sales channel.

Vendors will be assessed mainly on:

 Pricing competitiveness and pricing options offered to the client.

 Discounts and other strategies used to steer the deal in your favor.

 Extent of support provided to partners in complex deployments to expedite

sales cycle.

 Level of transparency, accuracy and consistency, and the extent to which

details are provided to customers when offering pricing information (either directly
or via partners).

 Customer proof-of-concept experience and help extended during solution

design.

 Account management.

Market Responsiveness and Track Record: This criterion refers to the

organization’s ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve
competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs
evolve, and market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendor’s
history of responsiveness to changing market demands.

Vendors will be assessed mainly on:

 New products or capabilities released during the evaluation period that
address market demands and gaps in the existing product portfolio.

 New products or capabilities released during the past 12 months that

created competitive differentiation.

 Track record of on-time delivery of roadmap during the past two years.

Marketing Execution: This refers to the clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of
programs designed to deliver the organization’s message in order to influence the
market, promote the brand, increase awareness of products and establish a
positive identification in the minds of customers. This “mind share” can be driven
by a combination of publicity, promotional activity, thought leadership, social
media, referrals and sales activities.

Vendors will be assessed mainly on:

 Number of local and international events targeted at customers and

prospects and their outcome.

 Number of events run jointly with technology partners and their outcome.

 Number of events targeted at channel partners and their outcome.

 Digital marketing campaigns run throughout the year and their outcome.

Customer Experience: This criterion refers to products and services and/or

programs that enable customers to achieve anticipated results with the products
evaluated. Specifically, this includes quality supplier/buyer interactions, technical
support, or account support. This may also include ancillary tools, customer
support programs, availability of user groups, service-level agreements, etc.

Vendors will be assessed mainly on the following factors. Data will be sourced from
Gartner client inquiries, Gartner peer review feedback, publicly available resources
and vendor customer reference survey:

 Tools used to proactively identify issues with the customer deployment and
remediate or notify the customer.

 Quality of technical support and account support.

 Quality and transparency of technical documentation.

Table 1: Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria

Enlarge Table

Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Product or Service High

Overall Viability High

Sales Execution/Pricing High

Market Responsiveness/Record High

Marketing Execution Low

Customer Experience High

Operations Not Rated

Source: Gartner (July 2020)

Completeness of Vision

Gartner analysts evaluate vendors on their ability to convincingly articulate logical

statements. This includes current and future market direction, innovation, customer
needs, and competitive forces and how well they map to Gartner’s view of the
market.

Market Understanding: This criterion refers to the ability to understand customer

needs and translate them into products and services. Vendors that show a clear
vision of their market listen, understand customer demands, and can shape or
enhance market changes with their added vision.
 Specific characteristics include:

 Alignment of current product portfolio with market needs.

 Company vision that demonstrates high-level understanding of future

market direction.

Marketing Strategy: This refers to clear, differentiated messaging consistently

communicated internally, and externalized through social media, advertising,
customer programs, and positioning statements.

Vendors will be assessed based on:

 Clear and consistent guidance to customers on the value of each product in

the product portfolio.

 Clear messaging and guidance to customers and partners on the evolution

of different generations of products.

 Understanding of various target customer personas and the ability to

communicate value to those personas.

Sales Strategy: A sound strategy for selling uses the appropriate networks
including: direct and indirect sales, marketing, service and communication. This
includes partners that extend the scope and depth of market reach, expertise,
technologies, services and their customer base.

Vendors will be assessed based on:

 Strategies used to sell direct or leverage global system integrators (GSIs),

SIs, value-added resellers (VARs) and distributor networks effectively to extend
market reach.

 Strategies used to onboard new partners and retain existing partners.

 Strategies used to effectively leverage technology partners and explore

alternative routes to market.

Offering (Product) Strategy: This refers to an approach to product development

and delivery that emphasizes market differentiation, functionality, methodology,
and features as they map to current and future requirements.
 Vendors will be assessed based on:

 Ability to introduce new features/products in a timely manner that aligns with

customer priorities.

 The ability to introduce new features to the core product, avoiding disparate
point-based solutions.

 Extent of dependence on other ISVs for specific software functionality.

 Hardware sourcing strategy.

 Build versus buy strategy, and the ability to integrate products from
acquisitions into the core product portfolio.

 Past and planned future release cadence.

 Overall focus on backup/recovery capability development.

Business Model: This criterion refers to the design, logic and execution of the
organization’s business proposition to achieve continued success.

Vendors will be assessed based on:

 Strategies used to sustain business growth in the long term despite external
factors such as price fluctuations, technology obsolescence and new competition.

 Strategies used to offset risks associated with sourcing hardware and

software components from partners. Risks include hardware quality, supply chain
management challenges and postsales support.

Vertical/Industry Strategy: This refers to the strategy to direct resources (sales,

product and development), skills and products to meet the specific needs of
individual market segments, including verticals.

Vendors will be assessed based on their ability to:

 Deliver solutions that address specific industry data protection requirements.

 Collaborate with industry specific technology providers to create reference

architectures and jointly go to market.
 Co-create products with industry-specific technology providers.

Innovation: This is the direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of

resources, expertise or capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or
preemptive purposes.

Vendors will be assessed mainly on:

 Ability to effectively leverage company IP (patents) to create differentiation

or enhance product capability.

 A product roadmap that reflects the ability to create competitive

differentiation in the market.

 A track record of product announcements (past 12 months) that differentiate

itself from competition, resulting in increased sales and customer satisfaction.

 Innovation in sales and business models that helps increase revenue and
retain customers.

 Innovation in postsales support that helped reduce issue resolution time and
increase overall customer satisfaction.

Geographic Strategy: This criterion refers to the vendor’s strategy to direct

resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of geographies outside
the “home” or native geography, either directly or through partners, channels and
subsidiaries, as appropriate for that geography and market.

Vendors will be assessed mainly on:

 Number of sales offices set up outside the home region.

 Channel partners onboarded outside the home region.

 Strategies used to enter new challenging markets.

 Product localization efforts to address language barriers.

 Product or features introduced to address country-specific or geography-

specific requirements.

Table 2: Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria

 Enlarge Table

Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Market Understanding High

Marketing Strategy Medium

Sales Strategy Medium

Offering (Product) Strategy High

Business Model Medium

Vertical/Industry Strategy Medium

Innovation High

Geographic Strategy Medium

Source: Gartner (July 2020)

Quadrant Descriptions

Leaders

Leaders have the highest combined measures of Ability to Execute and

Completeness of Vision. They have the most comprehensive and scalable product
portfolios. They have a proven track record of established market presence and
financial performance. For vision, they are perceived in the industry as thought
leaders, and have well-articulated plans for enhancing recovery capabilities,
improving ease of deployment and administration, and increasing their scalability
and product breadth. A fundamental sea change is occurring in the backup and
recovery market. For vendors to have long-term success, they must plan to
address the legacy requirements of traditional backup and recovery, while looking
to expand their integration with and exploitation of emerging applications,
hypervisors, snapshot and replication technologies, and public cloud capabilities. A
cornerstone for Leaders is the ability to articulate how new requirements will be
addressed as part of their vision for recovery management. As a group, Leaders
can be expected to be considered part of most new-purchase proposals and to
have high success rates in winning new business. This does not mean, however,
that a large market share alone is a primary indicator of a Leader. Leaders are
strategic vendors, well positioned for the future having established success in
meeting the needs of upper-midsize and large data centers.

Challengers

Challengers can execute today, but they have a more limited vision than Leaders,
or they have yet to fully produce or market their vision. They have capable
products and can perform well for many enterprises. These vendors have the
financial and market resources and the capabilities to potentially become Leaders.
Yet, the important question is whether they understand the market trends and
market requirements to succeed tomorrow, and whether they can sustain their
momentum by executing at a high level over time. A Challenger may have a robust
backup portfolio but has not yet been able to fully leverage its opportunities or does
not have the same ability as Leaders to influence end-user expectations and/or be
considered for substantially more or broader deployments. These vendors may not
devote enough development resources to delivering products with broad industry
appeal and differentiated features in a timely manner, or effectively market their
capabilities and/or fully exploit enough field resources to result in a greater market
presence.

Visionaries

Visionaries are forward-thinking, advancing their portfolio capabilities ahead, or

well ahead, of the market, but their overall execution has not propelled them into
being Challengers or possibly Leaders. (Often, this is due to limited sales and
marketing or elongated time to initially install and configure, but sometimes due to
scalability or breadth of functionality and/or platform support.) These vendors are
predominantly differentiated by product innovation and perceived customer
benefits. However, because some are relatively new to the market, they have not
yet achieved solution completeness or sustained broad sales, marketing and mind
share success, or demonstrated continued successful large-enterprise
 deployments required to give them the higher visibility of Leaders. Some vendors
move out of the Visionaries quadrant and into the Niche Players quadrant because
their technology is no longer visionary (the competition caught up to them). In
some cases, they have not been able to establish a market presence that justifies
moving to the Challengers or Leaders quadrants, or even remaining in the
Visionaries quadrant.

Niche Players

It is important to note that Gartner does not recommend eliminating Niche Players
from customer evaluations. Niche Players are specifically and consciously focused
on a subsegment of the overall market, or they offer relatively broad capabilities
without very-large-enterprise scale, or the overall success of competitors in other
quadrants. In several cases, Niche Players are very strong in the upper-midsize-
enterprise segment, and they also opportunistically sell to large enterprises, but
with offerings and overall services that, at present, are not as complete as other
vendors focused on the large-enterprise market. Niche Players may focus on
specific geographies, vertical markets, or a focused backup deployment or use-
case service; or they may simply have modest horizons and/or lower overall
capabilities compared with competitors. Other Niche Player vendors are too new to
the market or have fallen behind, and, although worth watching, have yet to fully
develop complete functionality, or to consistently demonstrate an expansive vision
or the Ability to Execute.

Context

I&O leaders tasked with backup operations must redesign the backup
infrastructure to include the following aspects of technology, operations and
consumption:

 Invest in backup solutions that address data protection requirements in the

data center, public cloud and edge environments. Prefer solutions that offer a
single pane of glass to manage these distributed environments.

 Choose backup solutions that provide a comprehensive solution for

ransomware detection and recovery. Thoroughly understand the level of resilience
provided on the primary copy of backup and the need to invest in additional copies
 of backup to ensure backup resilience. Choose products that offer a secure and
granular recovery testing experience.

 Align the backup architecture with your organization’s operational recovery

needs. Optimize backup storage usage by using disk-based backup appliances or
SAN storage for operational recovery and either tape or object storage for long-
term retention.

 Thoroughly understand the long-term total cost of ownership of moving from

perpetual licensing to subscription-based licensing models. For subscriptions,
understand the cost implications of annualized payments versus upfront payments
and exiting the subscription before the term is complete.

 Understand the long-term cost implications of various pricing models offered

by vendors — VM-based, socket-based, node-based, front-end TB, back-end TB,
agent-based. Invest in the right model based on the application and infrastructure
roadmap of the organization.

 Select vendors that support tiering of backup copies to the public cloud to
save on-premises storage costs. Choose solutions that support recovery of backup
copies in the public cloud to address test/development or disaster recovery use
cases.

Market Overview

The data center backup and recovery market underwent significant transformation
in the past two years. Backup vendors evaluated in this Magic Quadrant mainly
focused on the following areas:

 Centralized management: As enterprises move toward a hybrid IT model,

and workloads are distributed across the data center, public cloud and the edge,
protecting these workloads, irrespective of location, is critical. Leading backup
vendors are addressing this by offering a management platform that can be
deployed either in the main data center or via a SaaS-based platform.

 Ransomware resilience, detection and remediation: The recent increase in

the number of ransomware attacks has resulted in vendors taking concrete steps
toward providing ransomware detection and remediation as well as a resilient
 backup infrastructure. While most vendors support creation of immutable second
copies of backup through write once, read many (WORM)-enabled storage, others
such as IBM and Rubrik aim to make the primary backup repository more resilient
by supporting immutable snapshots.

Leading vendors are building capabilities to detect ransomware attacks by tracking

large changes to file system, and through other means, by partnering with security
vendors or by developing these capabilities in-house. Most vendors also aim to
simplify the ransomware recovery process through creation of an isolated test
environment, and provide a clean copy of backup to recover specific files. Such
efforts remain largely a work in progress.

 Support for public cloud IaaS and PaaS backup: During the evaluation
period, leading on-premises backup vendors increased their investment toward
building capabilities to protect cloud-native workloads, particularly virtual machines
and applications hosted in AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
While some vendors integrated the backup software with the native snapshot
capabilities offered by these cloud providers, most vendors continue to reuse their
existing backup software “as is” in the cloud to provide agent-based backup of the
applications hosted in the cloud.

Some backup vendors are also supporting backup of DBaaS products such as
Amazon RDS, Amazon Aurora and Microsoft Azure SQL.

 Support for SaaS-based applications: In the past two years, I&O leaders
have begun to include SaaS applications such as Microsoft Office 365, Google G
Suite and Salesforce as a part of their backup strategy. Most vendors evaluated in
this research have started delivering Office 365 backup via partners or developing
these capabilities in-house. Protecting G Suite and Salesforce remains largely a
work in progress.

 Tiering to the public cloud: Most vendors evaluated in this Magic Quadrant

support tiering backup data to the public cloud. This reduces on-premises backup
storage costs. The most commonly supported public cloud storage targets are
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Azure Blob storage. Backup
data in most cases is self-describing, meaning if the on-premises data and catalog
are lost, an instance of the backup software can be reinstalled and data can be
 restored. Some vendors also integrate with the life cycle policies of cloud
providers, for example, data migration from AWS S3 to Glacier or Azure Blob to
Azure Archive Blob storage.

 Recovery in the public cloud: Today, leading backup vendors support

restoring backup data to servers in the public cloud. An instance of the backup
software can be installed in the public cloud, and backup data can be restored to a
compute instance in the public cloud. This provides for quick operational recovery if
the on-premises environment is not available. The backup data can also be used
for test/development purposes in the public cloud.

 NoSQL database backup: While traditional enterprises continue to run their

core business applications on relational database management system (RDMS)
databases such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL, Mode 2 projects such as big data
usually leverage NoSQL databases such as MongoDB and Cassandra. As these
projects begin to scale and deliver tangible value, there is a growing need to
protect such environments. Backup vendors such as Commvault, Dell and Veritas
have started addressing these backup requirements by building such capabilities
natively into the backup platform. Emerging vendors such as Rubrik and Cohesity
have made strategic acquisitions in the last year to address this capability gap.

 Instant recovery of databases and virtual machines: A majority of vendors

support instant recovery of virtual machines by mounting the backed-up virtual
machine directly on the production host via NFS. Virtual machines can thus
become instantly available, while the actual recovery process can be initiated in the
background. Similarly, vendors such as Actifio, Cohesity and Rubrik offer instant
recovery of databases such as Microsoft SQL and Oracle.

 Subscription licensing: In 2019, several vendors began to prioritize

subscription-based licensing over a perpetual licensing model. Enterprises that are
migrating to the public cloud find the subscription-based model is a simpler way to
procure backup solutions. While subscription-based licensing is not necessarily
less expensive compared to perpetual licensing, it is more predictable and simpler
to manage.

Evidence

Gartner Peer Insights

Client inquiries

Evaluation Criteria Definitions

Ability to Execute

Product/Service: Core goods and services offered by the vendor for the defined
market. This includes current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets,
skills and so on, whether offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships
as defined in the market definition and detailed in the subcriteria.

Overall Viability: Viability includes an assessment of the overall organization's

financial health, the financial and practical success of the business unit, and the
likelihood that the individual business unit will continue investing in the product, will
continue offering the product and will advance the state of the art within the
organization's portfolio of products.

Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor's capabilities in all presales activities and the

structure that supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and
negotiation, presales support, and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel.

Market Responsiveness/Record: Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible

and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act,
customer needs evolve and market dynamics change. This criterion also considers
the vendor's history of responsiveness.

Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs

designed to deliver the organization's message to influence the market, promote
the brand and business, increase awareness of the products, and establish a
positive identification with the product/brand and organization in the minds of
buyers. This "mind share" can be driven by a combination of publicity, promotional
initiatives, thought leadership, word of mouth and sales activities.

Customer Experience: Relationships, products and services/programs that enable

clients to be successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the
ways customers receive technical support or account support. This can also
include ancillary tools, customer support programs (and the quality thereof),
availability of user groups, service-level agreements and so on.
Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments.
Factors include the quality of the organizational structure, including skills,
experiences, programs, systems and other vehicles that enable the organization to
operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing basis.

Completeness of Vision

Market Understanding: Ability of the vendor to understand buyers' wants and

needs and to translate those into products and services. Vendors that show the
highest degree of vision listen to and understand buyers' wants and needs, and
can shape or enhance those with their added vision.

Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of messages consistently

communicated throughout the organization and externalized through the website,
advertising, customer programs and positioning statements.

Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling products that uses the appropriate network
of direct and indirect sales, marketing, service, and communication affiliates that
extend the scope and depth of market reach, skills, expertise, technologies,
services and the customer base.

Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendor's approach to product development and

delivery that emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature
sets as they map to current and future requirements.

Business Model: The soundness and logic of the vendor's underlying business

proposition.

Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and

offerings to meet the specific needs of individual market segments, including
vertical markets.

Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources,

expertise or capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive
purposes.

Geographic Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings

to meet the specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography,
either directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for
that geography and market.

By Santhosh Rao, Nik Simpson, Michael