Backup Exec 3600 Pricing
[Same old disclaimer: I work for Unitrends and I’m more of a fan of Unitrends than I am Symantec. At the same time, if I have any facts wrong, I sure would like to know about it.]
Hey – one of the more popular blog postings here recently has been the one on the Backup Exec 3600 – so I thought I’d do a follow-up since at the time of the posting the pricing for the device was only rumored. (Note: If you want more information concerning the backup appliance itself, see the link above. Also, there are some matrix-based competitive analysis pages up for Backup Exec 2010 and the Backup Exec 3600.)
Since the time I wrote that, pricing has become more readily available. I was wrong about the MSRP base pricing – which a reseller had told me would be $25K – it’s higher than that. The MSRP is $32,995. You can find at some of the website discounts for a price ranging from $22K to $25K – thus the reseller I spoke to was pretty much right if you talk about “street” pricing.
I don’t think that Symantec is ripping anyone off on the appliance versus the raw cost of the software – Backup Exec 2010 is an awfully expensive application once you start adding all the various licenses and feature costs. In the Backup Exec 3600 original article, I compared the Backup Exec 3600 at $25K MSRP to the Unitrends byte-level, content-aware, deduplicating backup appliance with 6TB raw storage for less than $15K MSRP (that’s the Recovery-713.) For less than $30K MSRP, you can buy a Unitrends Recovery-823 which has 19TB of raw storage.
I’m always amazed at the pricing of the “big” companies like Symantec, CommVault, Tivoli, and others. I think Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, said it best the other day when he noted:
“There are two ways to build a successful company. One is to work very, very hard to convince customers to pay high margins. The other is to work very very hard to be able to afford to offer customers low margins. They both work. We’re firmly in the second camp.”
I’m pretty sure I understand where the camps line up here.
