“While we experienced a pause ahead of our Backup Exec product refresh, we continued to see momentum in our backup appliances,” Salem said during a call to address the earnings shortfall.

Symantec CFO James Beers the vendor anticipates reporting approximately $1.68 billion in revenue when it officially reports earnings May 2. Its original forecast for the quarter was between $1.72 billion and $1.73 billion. Symantec’s revenue was $1.67 billion for the same quarter last year.

Although overall revenue rose slightly from last year, the storage and server management group declined approximately 5% with an approximate 8% drop storage management and approximate 3% decline in backup and archiving.

Symantec recently upgraded both major backup applications, and now sells all of its backup products on integrated appliances. Salem said he expected “meaningful acceleration” of the appliance business over the next year.

“I expect that with the refresh of NetBackup and Backup Exec, that will return to more normal business,” Salem said. “We have the ability to sell software, the media server and deduplication in one device, and that’s something none of our competitors do.”

Earnings reports over the next few weeks should show if Symantec’s problems were limited to the vendor or industry-wide. Last week, EMC said its backup revenue grew. CommVault, FalconStor and Quantum are expected to report in the first or second week of May.