Gartner Inc. is offering up its latest Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup and Recovery Software, charting some interesting movements for Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. and Rubrik Inc.

The latter company is probably the biggest winner in this year’s edition, coming from nowhere to emerge as one of two “visionaries” in Gartner’s box. The company claims it set a new record for entering Gartner’s box in the fastest time since it was founded just over three years ago. Meanwhile, HPE is probably the biggest loser, having tumbled into the “Niche Players” box after being ranked as one of the “Challengers” just a year ago.

“Despite being a new entrant to the market, Rubrik has generated heightened market awareness and rapid adoption by upper midsize to large enterprises, augmenting or completely replacing mainstream data center backup solutions,” Gartner said of Rubrik’s emergence.

As for HPE, its impressive slump was blamed on its “lack of innovation and execution compared to major competitors,” Gartner said. It added that HPE doesn’t offer “socket or VM [virtual machine] bundle-based pricing, and references cite dissatisfaction with packaging and pricing.”

Looking at the top of the graph, Commvault Inc. has retained its lead at the top of the “Leaders” box, though Dell EMC and IBM Corp. have both moved up to close the gap.

Veeam Software Inc., another “leader,” also made a slight movement upward, though Chief Executive Peter McKay seems to have exaggerated its achievements somewhat, claiming that “our upward movement to the right is the biggest advancement in both Vision and Ability to Execute, outpacing our competitors as we drive ahead as the leader in Availability solutions for the enterprise with multi-cloud.”

Why is this important? Well, Gartner suggests in its introduction that the whole idea of data management is growing in importance among enterprises, which are beginning to view it as an entirely separate aspect of information technology with extremely valuable use cases of its own.

Image: Gartner