Features: Symantec has announced the availability of an enterprise backup reporting tool Veritas Backup Reporter 6.0 which helps IT administrators enhance their backup and recovery operations, verify backup service level compliance and run backup as a shared IT service.

Backup Reporter enables data management, backup consolidation and reporting of heterogeneous environments, which support Symantec's Veritas NetBackup and Backup Exec products, in addition to third-party backup solutions.

Backup Reporter also eliminates the time consuming manual process of creating ad-hoc reporting spreadsheets. Reports can be scheduled and distributed via email, thereby automating a process that can otherwise be prone to error.

"Backup Reporter is a timely solution to this growing need that helps take the guess work out of trying to comply with regulatory and management requirements," said Laura Dubois, research director, IDC.

The ability of Backup Reporter to run backup and recovery operations as a business also make this product ideal for managed service providers as it easily identifies resource consumption across diverse customer environments and provides usage data which can be directly used for customer billing.

For customers with multiple NetBackup environments, Backup Reporter can aggregate reporting into one centralized view using common NetBackup icons.

"Backup Reporter provides enterprises with superior reporting that delivers premier service-level management that today's enterprise environments demand," said Matt Kixmoeller, senior director, product management, Symantec.

Price: Pricing ranges between $135-$600 per backup device. It is based on the number of backup devices the customer needs to report on.