CommVault (NASDAQ: CVLT) and Incentra Solutions, Inc. (OTCBB: ICNS), a leading supplier of IT products and services in North America and Europe, today announced an extension to their existing managed services agreement. For the last five years, Incentra has been using CommVault
’s award-winning Galaxy
® Data Protection software as the foundation for their
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering. Since first making CommVault Data Protection software available in September of 2002 as part of a complete SaaS solution, the two companies have seen broad adoption as approximately 1,400 worldwide customers across multiple industries have leveraged the managed service to solve IT challenges such as branch office data protection, remote backup and disaster recovery.
To ensure the continued delivery of best-in-class services, the two companies have signed a new three-year agreement for the use of CommVault software. This agreement builds on their existing track record of success and will provide Incentra customers value-added data protection services as part of the SaaS offering, based on CommVault’s Simpana™ software.
According to Lauren Whitehouse, analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group, “Data protection delivered through a SaaS model is a booming market and carries with it an enormous potential for reducing IT infrastructure and personnel costs. Due to explosive data growth, data protection has become increasingly more time-consuming, error-prone and costly, leading IT decision-makers to examine outsourced solutions. The combined enabling technology from CommVault and infrastructure and service delivery from Incentra delivers a highly differentiated solution.”
Solidifying Position in SaaS Market: Building on Long-Standing Relationship
“With the right resources, expertise and budget, protecting and securing business data is less of a challenge; the problem is that most mid-sized businesses don’t have that capability,” said Shawn O’Grady, president and chief operating officer of Incentra. “Over the five years of our relationship with CommVault, we have validated that our SaaS protection applications are economically a better option when delivered by an experienced provider like Incentra. By using CommVault software to protect our customers’ data, we’re making it easier and less expensive for small to mid-sized businesses to have the levels of protection, reliability and availability they need for their business data.”
Recent industry analyst research confirms that more and more companies continue to evaluate SaaS to defer capital outlays and infrastructure costs. Gartner predicts that by 2011, the worldwide SaaS market will grow to over $19 billion1.
“Announcing that Incentra has renewed with CommVault and has managed well over 1,000 customers over the last five years is testament to CommVault and Incentra’s ability to deliver high-value SaaS data protection applications,” said David West, CommVault’s vice president of marketing and business development. “While there have been overtures into this market space by other vendors, none of them bring the level of experience and customer satisfaction that CommVault and Incentra have fostered in building this impressive client roster.”
Using the CommVault-Incentra SaaS delivery model, customers get the same features offered by traditional data protection software – including disaster recovery, encryption, SLA guarantees and storage reporting – without incurring the extra burden of running their own servers, operating a network to connect branch offices and hiring a large IT staff. By leveraging CommVault’s Data Protection software and the Incentra GridWorks operations system, Incentra provides businesses the ability to move the infrastructure, or at least the portion that deals with backup and restoration, offsite to achieve the appropriate level of business continuity for their operations. Backups are performed automatically and continuously either locally or over the Internet, and data is moved off-site to a remote and secure data center, without manual IT intervention by the customer.
Incentra customer Luxembourg-based COLT, provides data, voice and managed services to businesses, governments and telecommunications carriers throughout Europe. Like other service providers looking for data protection software, COLT faced two choices. “We could choose a traditional backup application or opt for the newer SaaS model and have our business-critical data managed outside of our premises, thereby alleviating many of the headaches and administrative costs associated with managing the protection of our IT infrastructure and its maintenance,” stated Jean-Philippe Sohier, product marketing director, COLT Managed Services. “The decision was to choose the most robust partner with competitive solutions for our customers. A solid provider in the market, Incentra offered us unbeatable service levels, low cost of ownership and the reliability of a high-end protection solution based on CommVault products.”
Pricing and Availability
For additional information on licensing data protection within a SaaS model currently available through Incentra Solutions Inc., please contact Incentra at partners@incentrasolutions.com.