Prism 2 is the upgrade to the Prism product Bocada rolled out in January. The original Prism consisted of the underlying engine to the vendor's legacy Bocada Enterprise product with a new Web-based front end and service-level agreement (SLA) impact and policy change analysis capabilities. The new version of the backup reporting application has been optimized for large-scale deployments with new trending reports and enhanced custom reporting.
Bocada CEO Nancy Hurley said the first Prism release was aimed solely at new customers because it would take time for Bocada Enterprise customers to migrate to the new application. With Prism 2, Bocada is offering migration and training services to help Bocada Enterprise customers switch. Bocada Enterprise will be replaced, although no end-of-life date has been set.
Hurley said one of the vendor's goals for Prism was to make Bocada
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more of a channel play, and it began recruiting channel partners in February. The vendor will still sell directly to managed service providers (MSPs) and cloud providers, but it will use VARs to reach other customers. "Bocada was not channel-friendly before; it focused on direct sales," she said. "One of the objectives of Prism was to make it channel-friendly. That's why we added wizards and custom dashboards." Bocada has lined up Avatar Systems, Bedrock, Chi Corp., Cognitve, ESS Direct, Nesource, Nitech, Promedia and VASS and is in late-stage negotiations with 11 VARs. Bocada also has signed with distributor Promark Technology.
Bocada does not charge customers to upgrade from Bocada Enterprise to Prism 2, but it does charge for migration and training services. Bocada's migration program moves the Bocada Enterprise database and customer reports to Prism. There are three levels of migration: a small tier for customers with fewer than 500 users, a midtier for customers with 500 to 2,500 users and a large tier for customers with more than 2,500 users. Pricing is $5,000 for the small tier, $25,000 for the midrange and $50,000 for the large tier.
There are three phases to the migration program: a requirements review, verification (includes migration and validation testing), and migration and training (full installation and hands-on training). Hurley said it should take no more than four weeks for a large-tier migration and a maximum of two weeks for the other tiers.
Bocada's data protection management competitors include Aptare StorageConsole and EMC Data Protection Advisor. Prism trend reports show information such as how long backups take each day, how all backup servers are performing, how much backup data is on disk and tape, and how the backup load has changed over time. The goal is to help identify bottlenecks in the backup process.
Chi Corp. Vice President Greg Knieriemen said many of these backup reporting features are missing from traditional backup products.
"We don't have another vendor like Bocada," Knieriemen said. "Now we can go to our customer base – especially the ones we sold backup to – and talk about Bocada for customers who don't have good reporting or under-reporting with their backup software."
He said some backup software applications do a better job than others in backup reporting. Knieriemen said he sees Prism as a particularly good fit for IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM), for example, and not as much so for CommVault Simpana, which has more advanced reporting than most backup software. He said he also considers Prism primarily an enterprise play for organizations backing up hundreds of servers.
"I can't tell you how many questions we were getting from customers about not being able to get qualitative reports for their backup and DR programs," he said. "They were hacking reports together through Excel or cutting and pasting information into reports. This will make their lives easier than hacking together home-grown reports."