EMC Makes Legato 'Wyser'

Rechristened WysDM Software Inc. has a new partner to go with its new name (see The Getting of WysDM ).

An EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) spokesman today confirmed that the company is selling WysDM software under the brand name EMC Backup Advisor as part of its Legato backup software family. EMC was planning to announce the OEM deal at a tradeshow in October, but word of the deal got out early.

Yes, EMC Backup Advisor is OEM'd from WysDM and is now available to customers as part of EMC's information management and protection offerings,” an EMC spokesman writes in an email. “Occasionally, products become generally available prior to public announcement. Backup Advisor will be formally announced in the near future."

On Tuesday, WysDM changed is name from SysDM to sync the company name with its product name. [Ed. note: No, it won’t be changing its name to EMC Backup Advisor now.] WysDM will continue to sell the product directly, but the EMC deal is expected to give it a lift over competitors Bocada Inc., Crosswalk Inc., Illuminator Software, ServerGraph Inc., and Tek-Tools Inc. in a nascent market.

This is the first major partnership between a backup software company and backup reporting/monitoring vendor, but it probably won’t be the last. Analysts say the reporting applications fill a big hole because backup software such as Legato and competing products from IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM)and Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) do a lousy job of reporting and monitoring backup jobs.“Any of those guys are candidates to get scooped up or make deals with the major storage vendors,” analyst Arun Taneja of Taneja Group says.

Why was WysDM first to land a deal? WySDM CEO Alan Atkinson says WysDM simply does a better job of going beyond pure reporting than the competition. For instance, WysDM can use backup performance patterns to help admins with capacity planning, and it sends alerts for potential bottlenecks based on usage patterns of tape drives and other hardware devices.

“I would say WysDM is a bit ahead on analytics, although there are more similarities than differences in the products at this stage,” Taneja says.

— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, BySDM