Symantec Invites Channel Partners to Participate in the Exclusive Backup Exec 2012 Partner Beta Program

Today, we’re announcing the availability of a partner-only beta release of Backup Exec 2012 and Backup Exec 2012 Small Business Edition.  Open exclusively to Symantec’s 60,000 global channel partners, the beta release will provide partners early access to one of Symantec’s market leading backup and recovery solutions.  Symantec wants to work with our partners to help customers fix the new challenges on controlling data growth, unifying virtual and physical platforms, and simplifying backup.  

The partner-only beta release will help Symantec’s partners address the three major “C”s of most backup environments of their customers: Complexity, Cost and Chronically shrinking backup windows. Our partners have told us that they need to give their customers a simple, single application that protects both virtual and physical environments and that is easy to configure while reducing overall management complexity. Such a solution should not add another expensive tool and should help them reduce overall costs in the IT infrastructure. Finally, with ever-expanding data growth, our partners have told us they want to deliver to their customers a tool that can help them address existing backup window challenges and restore applications, files and servers quickly after a disaster.

The beta release adds new features and benefits to help our partners address new challenges for their customers:

• Increased visibility:Virtualization has added a new layer of complexity by fragmenting backup (virtual and physical) and not allowing admins to see and manage both environments.  With V-ray technology, users have one console providing visibility across the backup environment – including both virtual and physical. 
• Data explosion:Throughout the years, although the amount of data being backed up has exploded and a new approach is needed to effectively back up business critical data.  To address the  problem of data explosion, Backup Exec 2012 beta will help organizations meet recovery objectives by completing full backups in the amount of time incremental backups take. 
• Disaster recovery:It takes too much time and money to rebuild physical machines.  To address the problems that exist around disaster recovery, we’ve implemented physical to virtual system recovery, which simplifies recovery if/when a disaster occurs, allowing users to create a virtual machine to replicate the physical one, allowing fast and easy recovery.
• Backup management:As data has grown, backup strategies and management grew in complexity setting up backup as way more complicated than it needs to be.  To address this problem, we’ve implemented intelligent backup, which makes it dramatically easier to set up and manage backups by providing a simpler interface utilizing insights from millions of users. 

Also, because we know many SMBs are implementing virtualization technologies, among other innovations, we’re offering a new Backup Exec 2012 Small Business Edition which will install in less than ten minutes and with three simple steps.  The new Backup Exec Small Business Edition will bundle Symantec’s data and system recovery into one solution with a single license designed for a growing business. 

We’re excited to provide this beta release to our partners as our first step in fixing the backup problem with an end to fragmented point solutions.