Customers Like Reborn LegatoCustomers Like Reborn Legato

When an important supplier of key infrastructure products gets acquired, customers become worried. Will the new owner continue to support the products? Will it improve and enhance the products? Will service and support be maintained? Those were some of the questions raised last year when storage-hardware leader EMC Corp. bought one of the top backup-and-recovery software vendors, Legato Systems Inc., for more than $1.3 billion.

So far, according to analysts and customers, the deal is working out well. "Legato always had very good products, but it was imprisoned due to its small size and instability," says Arun Taneja, an analyst at the Taneja Group. "With EMC, Legato has been unchained, and its true potential could be realized." As a division of EMC, Legato Software could double its revenue to $800 million in two years, he predicts.

Applera Corp., a life-sciences holding company, has been a Legato customer for more than four years. Earlier this year, it decided to consolidate all backup processes on the vendor's NetWorker platform. "EMC is very much leaving Legato alone," says David Lucas, director of portals and therapeutics services for Applera's global IT unit. "The Legato team hasn't changed at all since the acquisition."

The acquisition is part of an effort by EMC to shift from being mainly a storage-hardware vendor to one that derives more of its revenue from software and services. In the past year, it has spent billions of dollars to buy numerous software vendors and improve its customer service. Legato's Global Technical Support Center achieved certification under the Support Center Practices Certification program late last week. The Service and Support Professionals Association, made up of 25,000 service executives, confirmed through audits that Legato achieves a level of best practices for technical support, based on more than 100 business elements or aspects of technical support.

These efforts will help Legato in its battle with Veritas Software Corp., another leading vendor of backup applications. It also is helping Legato win new customers. Michael O'Dell, CIO at $100 million Pacific Coast Cos., which manufactures and distributes building materials, turned to Legato last year when his backup vendor couldn't solve some problems and tried to shift the blame.

Pacific Coast maintains 14 pSeries and 27 xSeries servers from IBM to support concurrent users accessing 27 terabytes of data, with about 700 Gbytes of space reserved for data from its SAP enterprise-resource-planning system.

The company was using NetBackup from Veritas, and the performance was good when it was installed in 2002. The company was able to back up data at between 10 Mbytes per second and 14 Mbytes per second when it first loaded up the product. But months later, O'Dell says, that declined to 4 Mbytes per second. "Veritas said my techs weren't skilled enough, the network wasn't robust enough, or SAP didn't pump the data fast enough," he says. "It was my fault."

Veritas says it worked closely with Pacific Coast to resolve the problems and made a number of changes but that it wasn't possible to analyze all of the potential performance problems in the data center.

O'Dell says he had other reasons to look for an alternative. "Converting the database from Windows to AIX was 75% more expensive than just moving to Legato," he says.

Legato's NetWorker backed up data at a rate of 30 Mbytes per second to 35 Mbytes per second at first, he says, and now is performing at more than 52 Mbytes per second. O'Dell admits that he had concerns about going with Legato following the EMC acquisition. In the end, he rates the deal "as a positive. EMC has the deep pockets and a good history with the mission-critical hardware market."