Can you briefly tell us a little bit about Vizioncore and your role?

I am Chris Akerberg and am President and chief operating officer here at Vizioncore. I joined the company in 2005. At that time, we had just introduced our flagship product vRanger Pro, and pioneered the concept of leveraging the VMware platform for disaster recovery. Since then, I have spent the last few years guiding major developments here, including the launch of five more products, the growth of our channel to 2,200 partners worldwide and the growth of our customer base to nearly 20,000 worldwide. Our products are used by companies across the spectrum – from the SMB to the Fortune 1000. Today, we are a wholly owned division of Quest Software, and we offer a comprehensive set of solutions to provide our customers with protection, monitoring and administration of virtual environments through each phase of growth. My current role encompasses overseeing sales and partner relations, product development and operations.

Which Vizioncore product offers the fastest ROI – how is it done?

I think if you focus on fastest ROI, then that would be our vOptimizer Pro product. vOptimizer Pro scans through VMware ESX hosts looking for and then adding up over-allocated VM storage. Companies can instantly see just how much wasted virtual storage they have accumulated and how much money they could save if they could reclaim this storage. Potential storage savings estimates are generated from customer entered information including storage costs and desired VM free space.

But our vRanger Pro DPP solution can probably have the most impact on ROI with very substantial returns, generating a minimum $15 net savings being obtained for every $1 invested based on the most conservative estimates. And this return can be achieved within the first year of adoption.

vRanger Pro DPP affects three areas in which savings are garnered: data collection, transmission, and recovery. In collection, we eliminate the need for expensive backup agents. The cost savings is immediate, because you are able to retire agents which are expensive to purchase, maintain, support, and provision. In transmission, we reduce the network and storage required to transmit and store backup copies because we enable data to be backed up one time and used for all types of recovery. vRanger Pro DPP also eliminated the need for expensive backup servers, which also become a performance bottleneck in most environments. Finally, our recovery enables fast rebuild of entire systems which translates into higher productivity because business users get back to work more quickly. Depending on the nature of the system that must be rebuilt, the ROI impact of every hour of downtime that we help our customers to avoid can vary.

vRanger Pro DPP was released last year, this was a major upgrade. What is new in Pro DPP & how has the upgrade been for your customers?

vRanger Pro DPP (4.x version) is the next generation of Vizioncore’s image-based backup and recovery solution. We re-architected this product from a point solution to a full blown platform for data protection. This is a revolutionary new software platform and some of the major refinements include:

• Scalable Backup Engine that allows unlimited backup jobs to be run on all available ESX Host Servers. This improved parallelism allows vRanger Pro DPP to complete more backups in much less time than any solution offered by our competitors.
• New Direct-to Target Architecture eliminates unnecessary stops at proxy servers and other backup and recovery components. The Direct-to-Target Architecture delivers faster backups by writing source data directly to backup storage.
• Reduced Backup Data Stream is produced by avoiding white space (unused storage) and deleted data areas of VM storage. The data stream is also compressed and verified for accuracy.
• Smaller Backup Data Stream reduces network traffic, minimizes backup storage requirements, and accelerates recovery operations.
• vAPI Interface allows for easy integration of vRanger Pro into existing traditional backup and recovery solutions.
• New LAN Free (Fiber) Backups allow customers to move backup operations away from other network traffic ensuring minimal impact on other business operations.
• ESXi Support allows customers to take advantage of the vRanger Pro DPP platform on VMware’s most cost effective virtual infrastructure offering.

Adoption has been very strong and our customers are seeing significantly shorter backup windows and improved performance with the new version. We believe we have a solid product with vRanger Pro, clearly superior to anything offered on the market today.

What percentage market share does vRanger have?

vRanger Pro has obtained a ~10% penetration into the VMware installed base, with over 15K customers around the world. Vizioncore’s position as the number one independent provider of server virtualization management solutions has been confirmed by leading industry analyst firms, Gartner and IDC as well.

Your parent company is Quest Software, when did the acquisition take place?

The acquisition of Vizioncore by Quest happened in December 2007. Since the acquisition, Vizioncore has been operated as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Quest Software.

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