Lauren Whitehouse, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), noted that even if the DPM software does meet the needs of large companies, Microsoft will have a difficult time persuading IT managers to use it.
"[Businesses have] too much invested, and they don't want the disruption that a new [backup] solution would bring," she said. "Microsoft is not the first name one thinks of when it comes to backup."
About 35% of 398 IT professionals recently surveyed by ESG said they have employed the same backup software for more than four years, and another 12% said they have used their backup product for more than eight years, Whitehouse said.
The latest version of Microsoft's backup software could find success in the fledgling virtual server business because of its support for Microsoft Virtual Server, she said. Still, she noted, the software is likely to remain mostly a niche product until it offers support for non-Microsoft platforms and applications.
At the Storage Networking World conference last month in Dallas, Microsoft officials said that the new version adds support for Microsoft's Exchange messaging software, SQL Server database software and the SharePoint Portal Server collaboration technology.
Rosy Predictions
In an interview at the conference, Ted Kummert, corporate vice president of Microsoft's data and storage platform division, said DPM 2007 is also able to perform continuous data-protection snapshots of Microsoft applications and file servers, which are integrated with tape and disk media.
Kummert said that future versions of DPM will interact with the software vendor's cache of data life-cycle management applications.
He cited two factors in his contention that Microsoft's nascent storage business has a bright future: the company's monstrous installed base, and the close working relationship among its development teams, which ensures that the products are tightly integrated.
Many corporations are already storing data "in our platform on various levels," he noted. "Yes, we do have some new products, but we feel like we've actually been in this game for a while."
David Lethe, president of diagnostic software vendor SANtools, said he was not impressed with the storage strategy Kummert described at the conference.
"[It was the] wrong audience -- we can smell BS," said Lethe. "He didn't tell us anything. [DPM] is unified if it's a pure Microsoft environment."
Sara Windsor, senior network engineer for the Tracy, Calif., Unified School District, said her employer's plan to migrate to Exchange 2007 last year led to a decision to install a beta version of DPM 2007 last year, since there is native integration between the two products.