We have some exciting news to share! on May 20, 2015, for the eleventh time in the last twelve years, MSExchange.org readers chose BackupExec as the best Microsoft Exchange backup and recovery solution in the market. http://buff.ly/1Sh71Yv
Now let me share a little about the hard road we’ve traveled back to our success, and where we are today.
Back in March 2012, Symantec release its latest version of BackupExec 2012. This was a major release with a lot of change. However, partners and customer were quick to share their displeasure with some of the changes we made
Based on the feedback we received, our product leadership assembled a highly seasoned team to begin addressing top concerns and quality issues heard from our customers.
We listened to our customers and their needs to address the top call generating issues. Our primary goal was increase the quality to such a level that customers would have the highest level of confidence in future Beta releases to be of production quality, fully supported directly by our developers 24x7. This allowed us to accelerate our velocity while increasing the quality of he release.
Below are some of our key focus areas which led to adoption of some new best practices for the Product Management team.,
- Agile Software Development - a combination of software development methods in which requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration across self organizing, cross-functional teams. This approach promotes adaptive planning, continues improvements, and encourages rapid response to change and faster time to market.
- Scrum Software Development – This provided us the opportunity to engage customers early and demonstrate our work during our bi-weekly sprint activities. This helped to confirm that we were solving for real-world problems and delivering true customer value.
- New Operating Framework - a set of proven best practices for managing our products, which make up the portfolio and with the end goal in mind of delivering high-value solutions that customers want to buy.
- Customer Driven innovation - this has allowed us to spend time listening and observing customers in their day to day environment, and identifying unmet needs to which we can go off and solve.
- Product Quality Beta – this program gained a lot of attention and as I mentioned before, our customers had high expectations and we delivered. In fact we set out on a journey to prove BackupExec 2014 was production quality and deployed a team of one engineer and one product manager to multiple customer locations around the Globe! The customers that were chosen including small, medium and large customers with a mix of physical and virtual environments.
- Customer Service & Technical Support – we made new investments in improving how we provide service and support. As we move on past BE 15 we will break out support into each of their respective geographies, providing the best customer support experience.
June 2014 Symantec released its new versions of BackupExec 2014. We listened and brought back those features that you valued most including multi-server job functionality and the Job Monitor.
Shortly after we release BackupExec 2014, on October 2014 Redmond Third-Party Reader's Choice Awards: BackupExec receives the Redmond “Platinum” Reader’s Choice Award. More proof that we were back on track!
After the release of BackupExec 2014 we continued to stay focused not only on what we learned, but also areas which we could make improvements based on the new methodologies and best practices deployed.
Based on our velocity and quality through the process, we learned that if we pushed harder we could deliver timely platform support, and move to a quarterly cadence in our release schedule. This equates to faster time to market, increased quality, timely platform support, and incremental customer value.
April 2015 we release BackupExec 15!
We proved not only could we continue to increase quality, we could increase performance for backup and recovery, improve GRT (Granular Restore Technology) and overall reliability, as well as deliver DAY ZERO support for vSphere 6.0.
We also introduced a new lower cost Capacity Edition Lite offering that allows new customers to start small and pay as they grow. For existing customers with active maintenance who want to move from al-a-cart to Capacity, we’ve made it simple.
Some additional areas that continue to show proof that our hard work is paying off:
- A decline in product related defects.
- The overall trend and increase in customer and product satisfaction.
- Faster adoption rate of new release due to moving to smaller quarterly release cadence.
- Highest Server install rate in the history of Backup Exec
- Exceeding expectations by delivering new platform support ahead of schedule. Our goal is Day Zero for new platform support.
We THANK our loyal customers and partners, and we welcome our new customers to the family. You have truly made an impact helping us to improve quality, reliability, and supportability. We hope you see that we are your trusted advisors when it comes to information protection and availability.
As a proud member of the Backup and Recovery Product Management team here at Symantec, we thank you.
Go Veritas!