Last week, Veeam published what we believe to be the largest independent research report on data protection ever. That’s a big claim, but if you look at most analysts’ reports, they typically survey 200 to 400 unbiased respondents; 300 is a sweet spot for regular research. Big reports might survey 600-800, maybe even 1,000 respondents. Veeam contracted a third-party research firm to do a blind survey of 3,000 IT Decision Makers, mostly in organizations over 1,000 employees across 28 countries around the world, all of whom influenced or determined the data protection strategies of their organizations.
Do you statistically need 3,000 respondents to understand a trend? NO, you do not, but …
- You do need 3,000 respondents if you want to cut by country and region, in order to understand the different drivers and challenges in North America versus Australia versus Germany (and everywhere in between). There are 28 different regional cuts being offered by Veeam teams and our partners, so that you can understand what is driving data protection in your part of the world.
- You do need 3,000 respondents if you want to cut by vertical industry, so that you can understand what Healthcare organizations are striving towards versus Financial establishments versus Public Sector institutions. Many organizations and industries responded to COVID and leveraged the cloud differently, and that affects their data protection strategies. Case in point, this survey had 259 Healthcare institutions, which is enough to do a whole separate (and statistically definitive) “Data Protection Trends in Healthcare in 2021” report. BOOM!!
There are lots of ways to cut the data, all of which are meant to ensure that Veeam continues to understand where customers want to go and how quickly they want to go there; so that we can help them back themselves up along the way and when they get there. There are arguably four categories in the data protection vendor landscape:
- Legacy data center-centric vendors
- Shiny unicorns in appliance formfactors
- Small startups that aren’t really on anyone’s radar
- Veeam
To understand the scale of this research, this survey had more respondents than some of those unicorns and startups have in total paying customers, period. #MicDrop
At Veeam, our goal is to continue to disrupt the IT market and lead innovation in data protection, just as we have since introducing VM backups into the all-physical world of yesteryear’s data centers. With five cloud-centric solutions (Office 365, Azure-hosted, AWS-hosted, GCP-hosted, and Kubernetes) already in market and more to come, the way that Veeam stays in front of where the market is going is by understanding the market; and that takes strategic research at scale. It’s one of the reasons that three years ago, Veeam hired two industry analysts, each with 30 years of data protection market experience, into the Veeam Office of the CTO. It has been my absolute privilege to collaborate daily with my research partner and former “Father of the Gartner MQ on Backup” Dave Russell (@BackupDave) on this project and several others.
Do you need 3,000 research respondents to create a marketing graph for your datasheet or webinar? No. But that isn’t why Veeam does research. Veeam looks at where you are going in IT to ensure that we can provide you reliable protection and recoverability of your data, wherever you need it.
By the end of Q1 of 2021, Veeam will have garnered over 5,500 respondents from a variety of personas that affect data protection strategy for current-gen and next-gen IT platforms. By the end of 2021, we’ll have shared the insights of nearly 10,000 independent, unbiased IT Professionals and IT Decision Makers related to what is driving their data protection methodologies. Because your IT strategies are what is driving Veeam’s strategy as we continue to lead our industry — not only in innovative technologies, but also in thought leadership for how data protection and data management must evolve to better meet your goals.
If you haven’t already, please check out the Veeam Data Protection Trends Report for 2021.
Also, don’t forget to check out our Industry Insights live streams on LinkedIn with a #dataprotectionreport hashtag.
As always, ping me at @JBuff — we’re here to help.