Backup & Beyond

Hot on the heels of Amazon removing the Beta tag and releasing Amazon EC2 for production, we are excited to announce the Beta release of Vembu StoreGrid Cloud AMI, which facilitates deploying StoreGrid in Amazon cloud computing infrastructure. This has been a long pending demand from our partner base, who are MSPs, VARs and IT Solution providers offering online backup services using StoreGrid.

StoreGrid Cloud AMI Beta is available for both Microsoft Windows Server and CentOS Linux Server. Also, the StoreGrid backup server uses the MySQL 5.0 database. All these are bundled together in the StoreGrid Cloud AMI to facilitate ease of deployment for our partners. Of course, we are working on lot more automation as we try to move into production release before the end of 2008.

Why is StoreGrid Cloud AMI relevant for our partners?

Our primary target market segment is Small and Medium Businesses. Considering the growing complexity of IT infrastructure it is our strong belief that it is not easy for software vendors to directly service SMB customers. Close proximity to the customer is extremely important when you service SMB customers. Hence the local VAR or an MSP is in the best position to provide IT services to a small and medium business customer. This is especially relevant when it comes to data backups and more specifically online backups. As we work with large number of partners servicing different types of small and medium businesses with different sets of requirements, it is an absolute must that any IT product or solution we build should provide the maximum flexibility when it comes to deployment options or other relevant functionality.

Given this context, we have always focused on giving as much choice to our partners as they go about augmenting their business with an online backup service powered by StoreGrid. Specifically, as cloud computing as a framework gains momentum, as an aspiring leader in the online backup category, we recognize the need to provide the choice of deploying StoreGrid in a leading cloud computing infrastructure - and nothing beats Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 for a start.

Moreover, for the last two years we have primarily worked with partners who are willing to host StoreGrid in their own data center and offer online backup services to their customers. Many of our prospective partners had expressed interest in having a solution which they can host in a cloud computing environment like Amazon EC2/S3. With the release of StoreGrid Cloud AMI, we are responding to a long under-served market demand.

With StoreGrid Cloud AMI, any IT solution provider (MSPs, VARs) can now start an online backup service without any capital investment. All they have to do is to get an account in Amazon Web Services, instantiate an instance of StoreGrid Cloud AMI, create and mount the Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume as a backup storage and start offering online backup service to their customers. It is as simple as that. The backup data stored in Amazon EBS is periodically backed up as a snapshot to Amazon S3 for redundancy. On top of this partners who require another level of redundancy can instantiate StoreGrid Cloud AMI as a replication server and replicate the backup data to another Amazon EBS volume. This again can be backed up as a snapshot to Amazon S3.

Our existing partners or partners who prefer to deploy StoreGrid in their own data center can now use Amazon cloud infrastructure as a redundant storage for the backup data in their data center. All they have to do is to deploy StoreGrid Cloud AMI as a Replication Server in Amazon EC2 and configure their internally deployed StoreGrid backup server to replicate the backup data to the StoreGrid replication server running in Amazon EC2.

As I said, choice and flexibility of deployment is what we provide our partners. To summarize, with StoreGrid, our partners now can offer an online backup service in the following ways:

1. StoreGrid backup server and StoreGrid replication server deployed in their own data center with their own local storage.

2. StoreGrid backup server and StoreGrid replication server in Amazon EC2 with Amazon EBS volume as the mounted storage. And for additional redundancy data in the EBS volume is backed up as a snapshot to Amazon S3 storage.

3. StoreGrid backup server deployed in their own data center with local storage and StoreGrid replication server deployed in Amazon EC2 with Amazon EBS volume as the mounted storage for the replication data. Again for additional redundancy data in the EBS volume is backed up as a snapshot to Amazon S3 storage.

4. Another deployment which is also popular amongst some partners is to deploy StoreGrid backup server on-premise in the end customer location so that there is local copy of the backup data for quick restores. And these partners can now deploy StoreGrid Cloud AMI as a replication server and replicate the on-premise backup server to the Amazon EC2 deployed replication server.

You can learn about more technical details on using the StoreGrid Cloud AMI at http://www.vembu.com/storegrid/amazon-ec2-s3-cloud-online-backup.html

It is becoming clear that the global economy is indeed going into a painful recession. Even though we have not seen the Wall Street turmoil and the resultant credit crunch affect our business so far, we are well aware that it would be a matter of time. We still expect our business to grow though at a much reduced pace. But we are well prepared to even face a negative growth for a few quarters. I am not a fan of Donald Trump but I seem to apply his investing philosophy in the way we run our business - which is “If you take care of the downside, the upside will take care of itself. In other words, if you have a contingency plan for everything that can go wrong, you can’t help but succeed.”

As I said in my blog post why our business will survive and thrive in this environment, we are going to continue to invest in what we believe are strategic investment for the long term. And that includes not just R&D to innovate around our product, StoreGrid, to make it more and more compelling for our partners and customers.

Going forward, we are going to use this opportunity to improve our business across all fronts which matter to our partners as they get impacted by the imminent slow down. This is the time every business is going to be extremely choosy about its spending and who they partner with for their IT solution needs. In order to increase the chances of our succeeding we simply have to raise the bar in what all we do. I strongly believe what we plan to do is applicable to all of our partners who are IT solution providers (MSPs&, VARs and Web Hosting Providers too) as they try to differentiate themselves to improve their chance of succeeding. The theme of what we plan to do is based on “Do More with Less”. These are efforts to ensure we are ahead of our competition when it comes to sheer breadth of our offerings and we are sure we have what it takes to standout from the crowd.

Firstly we are accelerating our efforts to put together premium support options for our partners. These plans will cover 24/7 customer support with guaranteed email response times, IM support, phone support, remote trouble shooting sessions etc. This will enable our partners in turn to offer better support and services to their customers thus improving customer satisfaction. This improved customer satisfaction, we believe, will build trust and get the SMB customers to stick with our partners during these tough times.

Secondly, we are also working on better marketing collateral, sales tools, demo videos etc. to ensure our partners are better equipped to win customers. These are efforts to enable our partners to really “Do More with Less”. If we help them with more tools, collateral, processes etc. they should be able to focus better on winning customers and retaining them.

I will talk about our R&D and other initiatives in more detail on separate blog posts as we make progress in each of those initiatives. Do keep checking for some interesting announcements in the next few weeks.

I write my first blog post at a time when I feel the economy is reaching its state of equilibrium which is to say that I consider the credit induced boom across the globe in the last few years as abnormal and unsustainable and it is indeed good we will be returning to what I consider normal and sustainable economic growth.

First some background. I am no economist and I admit my brain power is limited in a way that I cannot give you a logical analysis of what all was wrong with how the world economy was being managed. Nor I am endowed with a reading habit to read and quote from history. But I am also one to boast that I have tons of what is more important that pure intelligence - that is common sense combined with an optimal dose of self doubt. Common sense dictated that there is something wrong with what was going on around us. If we had followed the hype and planned for a 10 or 50 times growth VCs expect I am sure we would have come a cropper. It is all quite easy to follow the crowd, revel in the hype and convince yourself you are some genius who has directly descended from heaven. Fortunately, we had the guts and the confidence to question the popular wisdom and stay the course based on our instinct.

As a business, what did we do right during those times of euphoria? We just followed our instinct and decided not to participate. That is when startups and VCs were talking about raising money with a fictitious 5-year business plans based on the steroid induced economic growth, we told VCs who contacted us that we would not do business plans based on the then market euphoria. When common sense dictated that those were abnormal times we were uncomfortable in cooking up a plan without conviction. So we passed up any opportunity to raise venture capital. Instead we raised some angel investment from successful entrepreneurs who were comfortable with our approach. That is an unwritten and adaptable business plan based on what we believe are fundamentally sustainable.

We put our focus on building a product and slowly and steadily grew our partner and customer base and all this profitably.  In the process we built an internal culture of frugality combined with hard work and commitment. I strongly believe this culture of frugality, commitment and hard work based on our strong convictions is going to keep us in good stead in these tough economic times. As we expect the market to deteriorate considerably in the near future, we are in a good position to grow and become a dominating company in our category when the economy improves in the next few years. The reason is that our plans are always based on what we consider normal, logic driven economic growth and not the steroid induced growth we seem to have gotten used to in the last decade or so. We have always saved for the rainy day and we can sustain our operations without any revenues for at least two years. As we go into this severe downturn we can afford to and are going to increase our investment on R&D and improve our product and solutions. We will keep our marketing expenses under check to make sure we do not get ahead of ourselves trying to fight a possible market collapse.

From a business stand point I strongly believe majority of our partners who are IT solution providers (MSPs, VARs etc.) share our conviction. Almost all our partners focus on the small business segment. Besides my own conversations with a few of our partners, I follow many of the interactions they have with our partner relations and technical support team. Based on these interactions I know how difficult it is to service the small business segment where the IT budgets are small but the expectations are high. So I am reasonably certain our partners have been put though a grind in servicing the small business segment and in the process they have developed a culture of frugality and hard work. And this culture is what is going to differentiate the men from the boys when the dust settles and when the economy reaches its natural state of equilibrium. Hence I strongly believe that majority of our partners would emerge stronger after the downturn and we will be around to support their online backup business with a superior solution than what our competitors have to offer.

To better times and the return of sanity.