My thoughts on DCIG's Buyer's Guide

Last year NexSan published a Buyer’s Guide on midrange disk arrays that was written by DCIG.  NexSan got top honors in the guide.  This week CommVault published a Buyer’s Guide on Virtualization Backup that was written by DCIG.  CommVault was given top honors in this guide.

The folks at Veeam objected to the Buyer’s Guide in their Blog. Their objections seem to boil down to the fact that CommVault does not disclose the fact that they do pay DCIG to blog for them, and that Veeam did not reply to the survey, yet they were included in the results.  This allowed CommVault to say in their press release that they won out even over independent point-products “like Veeam.”

The folks at DCIG wrote their response to those criticizing the report — sort of. I say “sort of” because the only addressed the root question of how the buyer’s guide works, without addressing the accusations that Veeam made about Veeam not participating in the survey.

This quote

“DCIG receives payment for the different services it performs for storage providers. The services that DCIG provides include blogging, case studies, product reviews, executive white papers and full-length white papers. … In the interest of being fully transparent, a number of the storage providers included in this Virtual Server Backup Software Buyer’s Guide are or have been DCIG clients. No vendors, however, whether clients or not, have been afforded preferential treatment in this Buyer’s Guide.”

This next part of the quote is where I believe the key to this whole thing really lies:

“The client relationship means that we have more complete and better knowledge of a specific vendor’s products and solutions, and that DCIG would consider their virtual server backup software for inclusion in this Buyer’s Guide.”


Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston), four-time O'Reilly author, and host of The Backup Wrap-up podcast. I am now the Technology Evangelist at Sullivan Strickler, which helps companies manage their legacy data