Simplifying Data Protection is What InMage Does Best

Last week I had the opportunity to attend InMage's annual sales kick-off in Santa Clara. In so doing, I renewed my friendship with Bob Stuke who I have known for years as well as had the opportunity to meet and spend time with InMage's CEO, John Ferraro. All in all, it was a great time and provided me some valuable insight into how InMage Systems operates and the market opportunity that it has in front of them for its DR-Scout product.

It was, however, a side conversation that I had with Ryan Clift, InMage's Director of Sales from the Southeast, that gave me some insight into what message may best resound with users. Ryan has had a great deal of success in the Southeastern region of the US in general and Florida in particular selling InMage's DR-Scout. The interesting part is that, as he tells it, most of the users he speaks to are not really all that interested in CDP or even care that Host-Off Loaded CDP is what powers DR-Scout underneath the covers. Rather it is DR-Scout's faster recovery times, the elimination of tape and lower management and maintenance costs that are catching their attention.

More interesting is the fact that in these face-to-face sales meetings, this may be the first time end-users are hearing this message. As someone who studies storage on a daily basis, this is a message that I have heard for years but to many users, this is new information.

Users are awash in information from multiple different sources. Magazines, emails, marketing literature, web sites, podcasts, webcasts, radio, TV - you name it, the information is out there but making sense of it all and connecting the dots is no small feat. There are so many sources of information available to users that users are looking for a trusted source to help them make sense of that information and connect the dots.

A good example of this occurred while I was talking to Ryan. He mentioned that InMage has OEM relationships with a number of vendors including Xiotech. When he said that, I wondered if that was public or classified information. So when I returned home I did a quick search of the Internet on Google using the keywords "InMage" and "Xiotech" and quickly turned up numerous public references about this relationship. The point is, I cover the storage market every day and I still miss factoids like this; so it is only natural for users, who have a lot more to worry about than storage, to miss some of the major trends occurring in storage management.

Without a doubt, I am a fan of CDP in general and InMage's DR-Scout in particular because of its off-host architecture and InMage's mid-term CDP roadmap. However, what I am most in favor of is users identifying technologies that alleviate some of their backup and recovery woes and make data protection easier in the process. While my conversation with Ryan helped to remind me was that at the end of the day, simplifying data protection is what InMage does best.