Quick FAQ’s for Press
What market does Bocada Prism address?
Bocada Prism was purpose built to help customers move through the Data Protection Service
Management model, a multi-phase set of best practices to ensure cost effective delivery of data
protection services to customers. Bocada Prism is much more than a backup reporting solution, Bocada
Prism is a service management application. Bocada has leveraged years of customer experiences to
create a workflow driven, intelligent analysis solution with built in SLA impact analysis, change tracking
and trend analysis and a searchable knowledge base to ensure organizations can meet business goals
and improve operational efficiencies.
Who is the target customer?
As this is a solution focused on improving data protection service delivery, this is an ideal product for
any managed service provider (MSP) , SaaS or Cloud services vendor offering backup and data
protection services.
However, this is by all means a solution that can be targeted at the end user, specifically mid-large size
enterprise organizations. Any IT organization that has adopted or plans to adopt ITSM initiatives, is
concerned about delivering against SLAs or needs to do chargeback is an ideal candidate. Bocada Prism
can be targeted at any vertical segment, however over the years we have found that organizations that
are truly depend on data availability for business operations and are subject to compliance regulations
are the best targets- this generally includes financial institutions, healthcare, energy, retail and
bio/pharmaceutical organizations.
What are 5 top reasons customers will want to buy Bocada Prism?
Bocada Prism is the only solution on the market that is solely focused on enabling end-users and MSP’s
to effectively deliver data protection services to either internal or external customers.
The key customer benefits are:





Lower overall operational costs.
Increased customer satisfaction
Increased recoverability and lower cost of downtime
Better IT business alignment
Significant process improvement
What are the key competitive differentiators?
Prism has many competitive differentiators, however these are the most significant, unmatched
competitive differentiators (please see competitive matrix for more details)





SLA Impact analysis
Policy change impact analysis
Enables annotation and knowledge transfer
Completely agent-less solution
Broadest heterogeneous support
What is the difference between Bocada Prism and Bocada Enterprise?
Bocada Prism is the next generation solution for the Data Protection Service Management market.
Bocada Enterprise has been on the market for nine years and has a very substantial installed base. The
next generation solution (Prism), leverages the same market leading scalable data collection engine and
open database that is in Bocada Enterprise, however the new product has been improved upon based
on our observations of how customers used our product. Prism has a built in workflow, intelligent SLA
impact analysis, policy change analysis and a knowledge base data base. Unlike Bocada Enterprise, Prism
has a completely web based front end and new APIs which better enable integration with third party
solutions (such as trouble ticketing applications).
Does Bocada Prism replace Bocada Enterprise?
While we want all of our partners to lead with Bocada Prism, we do understand that many of our
installed base customers are familiar with the current solution and have extensive databases and
processes in place using Bocada Enterprise. Our current roadmap plan is to provide a full upgrade path
for installed base customers’ mid-2010.
Is Bocada Prism considered an SRM solution?
No. Storage Resource Management (SRM) solutions are focused on providing discovery and capacity
analysis for primary storage solutions (such as disk arrays and NAS filers). Prism is solely focused on
evaluating the data protection environment- often referred to as secondary storage.
What backup and replication applications does Prism support?
Bocada Prism has the broadest heterogeneous support of any data protection management
solution on the market. Applications supported include IBM TSM, Symantec NetBackup, Backup Exec,
and Puredisk, EMC Networker and Avamar*, Microsoft Data Protection Manager 2007, CA BrightStor, HP
DataProtector, Sun Storagetek ACSLS, Commvault Galaxy*, Syncsort. In addition, Bocada offers a
Generic Application plug-in (GAP) which enables centralized reporting on any backup or replication
solution that can export a CSV file of log events.
*specific plug-ins that have not gone through a full QA process are available for purchase but are not
sold with maintenance and are not guaranteed same level of support. Please contact your channel
managers for more information.
Is Prism truly an agent-less application?
Yes, Prism (and our long term product Bocada Enterprise) is a completely agent-less solution. This
means customers do not need to install anything on the backup or replication servers. There are many
benefits to an agent-less solution including quick and easy deployment, exceptional scalability, easy
updates and minimal change management requirements.
The competitors say they are agent-less as well, how is prism different?
Some of our competitors claim to be agent-less, however none are fully agent-less. Much of their
“advanced” functionality requires an agent be installed on the backup or replication server. Any claim of
“real time” alerting and management requires an agent. By requiring agents, our competition is putting
a bigger administrative and change management burden on the end user customer. Please see the
competitive matrix for further detail, and refer to the white paper “The Benefits of Agentless
Architecture” for more information.