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Interview with Dean Goodermote, Double-Take CEO
“We have the technology and the reputation to play a key role in the Cloud”
How has the economic crisis impacted Double-Take?
For the first part of last year I denied there was an impact on us, but it's pretty clear that there was. But if you look at us our situation is similar to or even better than vendors like VMware or Citrix.
What's your positioning with respect to virtualization vendors?
We work well with VMware and we've always worked tightly with MS, for many, many years. We fill in a lot of gaps for them. Right now we don't see a lot of demand to protect Hyper-V systems, compared to ESX. I think the big push is going to come with R2. We haven't done much with Citrix, we don't see much Xen.
What is Double-Take's key differentiator?
We did something a couple of years ago that I don't think we've gotten credit for in the market. That's probably our fault. We came up with the ability not just to continuously replicate files and the underlying data but any changes to operating systems and applications, over any network, on any type of hardware, including physical and virtual servers. It's not just your data, it's the current look of your system, the way it looks today, the current version of Exchange or SQL server or the Windows server environment. In parallel we've developed solutions which add migration, backup, and boot from iSCSI SANs. There's very little on the market answering all these requirements.
Certain competitors – Vizioncore, Veeam – have taken the same approach as you...
Yes and no. Right now we're not in the place where we're really backing stuff up yet, but we have other features. They're focused on virtual systems. We play well with the two major virtual systems – Hyper-V and VMware – but we also work with the physical world.
Double-Take has made several acquisitions. Is there still anything missing?
We haven't really finished fully integrating the technologies we've acquired recently. I think there might be orchestration software we need to help you manage large volumes of servers. We've also been seeking some pieces for the desktop. If we really want to aggressively go after that desktop we have to do much more. The world changes every couple of years anyway. Even if we had everything today we wouldn't tomorrow.
Does Double-Take have a role to play in the Cloud?
Yes, for several reasons. We're already in what VMware calls the “internal” cloud. Cloud computing relies on your clients trusting you, and we have a pretty good reputation in the market. They trusted us before, taking their information and moving it from one place to another, and they’ll trust us in the future for migration and replication services. We have the technology to do it and the reputation. And we're working on delivery through the cloud. For instance you might have a fairly simple way to take what you've got on your servers in your office here in Paris that you want to continuously replicate to inexpensive servers for a monthly fee to Amazon. We already have something that you could do that with. I don't think we're ready to launch it yet but it's not far off.
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