In December we announcedthe availability of a partner-only beta release of Backup Exec 2012 and Backup Exec 2012 Small Business Edition. The beta program was a huge success with literally hundreds of partners participating, providing valuable feedback and sharing their successes with us.

Today, we’re excited to introduce Symantec Backup Exec 2012.

Backup Exec 2012 is truly the culmination of our global team of expert engineers who spent million plus man-hours singularly focused on changing the playing field of backup software. And the result is an amazing product that is focused around three key themes: Eliminating complexity; providing virtualization-centric protection; and our offer to customers of one product, any recovery. As these themes are an essential component to the product, I’d like to expand on each of them.

Eliminate Complexity

As we worked with and listened to our customers and partners, we found that flexible delivery models were needed in the form of software, appliances and cloud-based backup solutions.  In addition, small businesses have some unique needs that should be accounted for. So, in addition to completely reworking thousands of lines of code, we have provided Backup Exec in four standard editions:

• Backup Exec V-Ray Editionfor customers with 100 percent virtualized environments that don’t want to pay for a separate product.
• Backup Exec Small Business Edition for small businesses with limited IT experience that want to protect their data with ease. 
• Backup Exec.cloudfor customers who want simple off-premise data protection through a fully secure cloud-based service that is easy to setup, manage and configure.
• Backup Exec 3600 appliancefor customers who want an all-in-one, affordable data protection solution for physical or virtual environments that reduces backup windows and storage and management costs.

In addition, we literally redesigned the user experience of Backup Exec 2012 from the ground up to offer our customers an user interface that helps them focus on the resources they are protecting, rather than solely on the status of jobs. Administrators can monitor the backup status of critical application servers, see issues and performance over the last seven days and view other key indicators that allow them to make important decisions about how to properly protect their environment. Simply put, we are enabling our customers to focus on running their business versus managing technology processes.

Virtualization-Centric Protection

Virtualization is a technology change that is growing exponentially in our segment. We have been seeing tremendous growth in the past, and in this release we are doubling down on virtualization focused products. Our customers have told us that they want one product to backup their physical and virtual infrastructure to reduce costs as well as increased visibility across their infrastructure. While Backup Exec 2012 provides the best technology for physical and virtual infrastructures, our new offering Backup Exec 2012 V-Ray edition is focused on the 100 percent virtual environment. This product supports both VMware and Hyper-V environments. It also provides all of the benefits of V-Ray technology to Backup Exec customers. Our V-Ray edition is extremely well positioning to leverage the rapid growth of the Virtualization mega-trend and drive significant growth.

One Product, Any Recovery

SMBs want complete recovery but it should be seamless as well as cost-effective to implement. Backup Exec 2012 simplifies bare-metal disaster recovery for servers. It provides hardware-free recovery with physical-to-virtual and backup-to-virtual conversions for instant restore in a virtual environment. And, recovery to the cloud makes it easy and inexpensive for SMB customers to integrate to their cloud environments.