ESG Completes 150th Lab Validation Report

The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) has reached a milestone with the publication of its 150th ESG Lab Validation report.

ESG Lab provides in-depth testing and analysis of data center technology products for companies of all types and sizes. An ESG Lab Validation report offers objective, third-party verification of a product’s capabilities, along with an insightful ‘Why This Matters’ analysis that reveals business impact and is specifically designed to help IT Professionals make informed purchase decisions.

Since the first validation report was published in 2003, ESG has evaluated a broad range of emerging technologies in the server, storage, data management, and information security industries. The depth and relevance of ESG Lab’s expertise is exemplified by its growing library of backup and recovery product evaluations. Recent ESG research indicates that improving backup and recovery is one of the top three priorities for IT managers in 2010. Avoiding downtime is clearly a driver, with 53% percent of IT managers reporting that they can tolerate one hour or less of downtime for tier 1 applications before experiencing significant revenue loss or other adverse business effect. This accounts for the growing demand for ESG Lab Validations in the backup and recovery space over the past six years.

ESG Lab has tested a broad spectrum of backup and recovery solutions that utilize a variety of deployment models including on-premise software, on-premise appliances, off-premise SaaS solutions hosted in private clouds, and hybrid solutions with on- and off-premise capabilities. ESG Lab has completed and published reports for Asigra Cloud Backup, CA ARCserve, CommVault Simpana, Dell DL2000 Powered by CommVault, Dell DL2000 powered by Symantec Backup Exec, Dell DP100, EMC Avamar, EMC MozyEnterprise, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM), Symantec NetBackup PureDisk, SyncSort Backup Express, and Venyu AmeriVault Backup.

"The publication of our 150th report is a significant milestone because it further validates that ESG Lab is the gold standard in independent product testing and analysis," said Brian Garrett, Vice President, ESG Lab. "Our clients return to us again and again because our team validates not only a product’s features and performance but also the key factors that influence purchase decisions. We’re excited about the future of ESG Lab as we expand our business into Europe and China and add new products to our portfolio."

Since validation builds credibility, ESG Lab has expanded its standard product offerings with ESG Lab Field Audits that go direct to end-users to gain candid, unfiltered product information. An ESG Lab Field Audit documents the results of a series of customer interviews performed by ESG. The feedback collected directly from customers using technology solutions in production environments is documented in a highly instructive report that clearly presents the business problems addressed, the configuration deployed, the customer feedback in their own words, and, most importantly, the popular ESG Lab perspective on ‘Why This Matters’ to IT professionals.

"We believe that the ESG Lab Field Audits are an efficient way to be responsive to customer reference requests from prospects," said Eran Farajun, Executive Vice President, Asigra. "Experienced folks understand that when they ask for reference accounts from a vendor, they are typically provided with names of the happiest customers, which skews their due diligence. The ESG Lab Field Audit disarms those concerns by documenting credible, unbiased, and direct feedback from a variety of real users."

ESG Lab provides a proven testing methodology performed by a uniquely qualified team that uncovers the concrete, meaningful data and provides the analysis you need to make today’s business-critical decisions.