Welcome to 2015!

Happy New Year!

Welcome to 2015! Hope it is a safe and prosperous one for all. I want to look forward to the next 12 months and provide some comment on v6 progress and general market observations.

Many of you have already heard about the upcoming release of v6 of Macrium Reflect™. You will know that our plan was to get it to market before the end of 2014. However our drive to make the software the best it can be means we now aim for the end of January 2015. I am sure many of you are aware that taking a major new product to market is a challenging undertaking! If you are like us and want to make it extra stressful then you launch a new go to market strategy, website, support offerings, licensing, channel programme, product codes… Needless to say it all has to work perfectly so we are being extra careful.

I wanted also to share my thoughts on what we are going to focus on for 2015. Some of you will have seen our blogs and opinion pieces on the IT Administrator, and how we use them as inspiration for the exciting new features in v6. This is still very true, however, we also keep in mind our many large enterprise customers and their needs.

We are well aware that most organisations do not use a single, unified solution for all backup and DR needs, but typically use best-of-breed point solutions for different requirements. This is normal and not necessarily a problem for organisations that have the skills and administration capabilities to optimise a complex environment. Our customers tell us that the ability to monitor and manage these solutions is the most important requirement and we agree.

Starting in Q2 2015 we will be launching an “Enterprise” version of Reflect™ that will enable Macrium Reflect™ to be manageable via our own web based console, and be able to be monitored through most event management tools. The aim is to provide better integration into admin tools such as Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager. As we develop the roadmap for these enhancements we will let you know when they can be expected to be released.

In the meantime expect v6 very soon, and let us know how we are getting on with delivering on features that provide fast, reliable backup and DR for physical and virtual systems.