Andrew News emerged Friday regarding EMC’s acquisition of data protection reporting software maker WysDM . The move is not entirely surprising due to several years of partnering arrangements between the two companies. WysDM, the New York City based independent software vendor, brings significant enterprise credibility gleaned from a Wall Street pedigree, with several founders coming not from Silicon Valley, but from the technology organizations of major investment banks. WysDM offers a strong portfolio of backup and primary data reporting tools — an area that is sorely lacking in most data centers today. With all storage environments growing at a significant pace, companies need to know how much data resides in what store, what the backup and replication scheme is for each piece of data, and must have the ability to measure the performance of all of the elements of a complex data storage environment. In most environments, backup job success rates are abysmal, policies are nearly impossible to audit, the ability to meet backup windows are under severe pressure, and decision-makers generally don’t have the tools to identify what the bottleneck truly is.

WysDM offers tools to assist with all of these problems, and EMC is likely to put them in the hands of more customers. Symantec has offered the Backup Reporter module for their NetBackup product for more than a year, and CommVault has come to challenge the big players in this market due in no small part to advanced data reporting capabilities. EMC’s Legato and IBM Tivoli have lagged in this area, and it therefore makes sense for EMC to take on the WysDM product, tried and tested as it is in EMC environments. This move will likely prompt IBM to take a good hard look at acquiring WysDM competitor Bocada who they have partnered with. EMC needs to proceed carefully with integration to avoid diluting the strong WysDM interoperability with data protection suites offered by Symantec and IBM.

What is the upside for IT professionals? This is likely to be good for both EMC and consumers as data protection reporting is a key function, directors of enterprise storage environments would be remiss not to have this high on their priority list. If EMC manages this acquisition well, the vendor will use the WysDM technology to give a shot in the arm to the reporting capabilities of their overall storage resource management portfolio, which continues to lag behind that of competitors.

By Andrew Reichman

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