Word has emerged that Symantec is to drop its cloud back-up service Backup Exec.cloud. It will stop selling new subscriptions from January 6 2014 and existing users will have 12 months to find an alternative home for their desktop and server backup files.
The storage and management side of the business has been performing erratically (as has the business as a whole, leading to CEO and senior exec changes and organisational restructuring, see here and work back) so this could be seen as Symantec streamlining its bulky portfolio. But it has more to do with pain inflicted by the cloud-based offerings from Box and Dropbox, and even Salesforce.com, plus similar Microsoft and Google offerings, that offer features like file sharing and synchronisation in addition to baseline backup capabilities. The Symantec offering does not match them in terms of scope – and clearly the company does not see any upside in trying to compete.
One of the less obvious takeaways is the affirmation that suppliers cannot get away with offering basic cloud services. They need the scope and quality of on-premise offerings plus something extra - the ability to take specific advantage of the cloud environment. Yet the commodity-level subscription prices that persist in the market do not reflect this (or the costs of free-to the-user constant updates and capability expansion, and supplying the service). Something has to give – Symantec has ‘given’ on this particular cloud offering; on an industry-level scale something has to change in term of the cloud service pricing model or Symantec won’t be the only one pulling back.