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Where does Vembu Home fit…in the grand scheme of things?

by lux on October 9th, 2009

where does it fit in

We’ve been in business since 2004. Our Service Provider Edition has been available since early 2006.

Our flagship product, StoreGrid runs on over 100,000 computers, and is ‘under the hood’ of about 1,500 service providers across the globe.

StoreGrid is also ‘under the hood’ of our new Vembu Home service.

So, why are we launching our own service?

Are we (shudder) planning on competing with our own service providers? Are we changing our business model?

No, and no.

Hopefully, the following points will place things in perspective…

  • We’ve been squarely focused on ‘business backups’ so far. This focus will continue – in fact, it will become a LOT stronger.
  • We’ve been focused on Service Providers so far. We will be even more focused on service providers, going forward…
    • Last week, we released v3.0 of our Service Provider Edition. If you thought the v2.x had enough features, v3.0 is v2.x on steroids and red bull! And it is built only with Service Providers in mind. The big news with v3.0 was reseller & customer management, Webservices APIs for integration with service providers OAM systems, etc. Almost all of these are features that are ‘useless’ to Vembu Home. We wouldn’t have a team ten times the size of the Vembu Home team working for months on v3.0 SP Edition if we didn’t ‘want’ service providers.
    • To emphasize our commitment (to Service Providers) any more, we’ll need to run around screaming “service providers, service providers,…” like someone you know did – for developers. That’s not our style (and we don’t have Axillary Hyperhidrosis).
  • Vembu Home is built atop the StoreGrid engine – with a consumer-ish, iPhone inspired UI – and a strong consumer focus, to match. The consumer focus is reflected in its focus on backup to local disks, and Amazon Cloud Backup for consumer data. Once we are out of private Beta, our EULA will also reflect this – that Vembu Home is only for Home users, NOT for business users. Does this model work? Can a company do this successfully? AVG Anti-Virus is a good example – running on over 80mn computers, over $140mn of sales, and a valuation of $800 mn.  And yes, they also have a free edition that rocks – and a booming distributor & reseller channel that’s making profits. My kids run their free edition on their laptop; my own copy was purchased from Maptech, a VAR+MSP in Chennai. By the way, I just found out AVG are HQd in little Cyprus (lovely country for a holiday). Anyway, I digress… I’m not saying we’re doing exactly the same as AVG – just that ‘new business models’ that were previously unfathomable – are now ‘happening’ and are ‘possible’.
  • YES! The Vembu Home UI will, at a later date, be made available to service providers too – to offer to their customers. In fact, since the EULA (will) allow only for ‘home usage’, business users will primarily be getting their ‘slice’ of Vembu Home – through our channel partners! Vembu Home is still young – it’s in Private Beta. At this time, we are looking for adoption – and feedback. Once all the smooth edges have been further smoothened, we will offer our partners the option of using the sexy, hot Vembu Home UI with their customers. And once we’ve done that for some time, we will also offer branding options. Build-O-Matic (our automatic build generator used by most of our partners) was not built for Flex+AIR. It was built for our browser UI (we were the first to have a browser UI all the way, by the way). We need to reinvent the wheel (rather, Build-O-Matic) here. Reinventing a wheel takes time.

So, honestly speaking, what do we hope to achieve with Vembu Home?

  • Building a Brand, for one. We want our partners to be able to go to a customer and proudly say they’re using a “Vembu Powered Solution”. Vembu Home is one way to facilitate this – by building the brand equity for the Vembu+StoreGrid franchises. Since Vembu Home is also “powered by StoreGrid”, partners who are using a “Powered by StoreGrid” badged (advanced co-branding) UI will hopefully walk a little taller. And honestly, it really gets our goat when another vendor introduces a feature we’ve had for some time – and the net-o-sphere behaves like it’s the best thing since sliced bread. We shake our heads in disbelief and go “If only more people knew what we do”. Vembu Home is an effort in that direction (towards making us stop shaking our heads in disbelief)
  • Second, Experience. Putting our money where our mouth is! In spite of powering the backup business of 1,500 providers, nothing beats doing it yourself – to understand pain points of your partners. Besides the software part, this also helps us build our capabilities in Cloud hosted backups. Next time a service provider asks us “does this Amazon thingie really make sense for my kinda business” we can look at him squarely in the eye and answer him accurately – hopefully.
  • Thirdly, new opportunites: Since Vembu Home is much better than all the backup software that (sometimes) come bundled with External Disk Drives, we’re also hoping to land a few OEM deals with Hard Drive manufacturers who really care about how their customers derive value from their hard disks. So, that’s another objective behind Vembu Home. If you are a hard disk manufacturer, please try Vembu Home. Then, contact us.
  • (It’s cliché time) Last & certainly not the least: MARKETING. Having a consumer ‘angle’ allows us to do ‘things’ we typically wouldn’t do – with just a B2B product. Wait till you see our “Cloud Cloud Maybe” parody video to know what I am talking about. Trust me, it’s worth the wait. We’ll be doing a lot more ‘crazy things’ we wouldn’t have done earlier. Vembu Home affords us the canvas to do so. Heck, we even have FaceBook pages for Vembu Home & StoreGrid. Vembu Home tweets; so does StoreGrid. And I’m getting my ear pierced, my arm tattooed, and riding a Segway to work! Scratch that last bit.

Basically, a lot of it boiled down to ‘building our brand’. Honestly, we don’t believe there’s a lot of money (yet) in the way consumer backups are currently pitched. We  believe the existing leading consumer backup services are bleeding – and bleeding bad. Especially with their unviable ‘all you can eat’ models that spend 4X to get a customer whose lifetime value is X. There are many examples of companies that can afford to bleed! Typically, they are acquired by companies that have other priorities, highly funded or bored with what they’ve done for years and looking for new stuff to do.

And we – with our ‘boring’ business focus? We’re doing well (could always be better :-) though) with our focus on businesses. Thank you very much! And we recently started making some profits and reaping off those years of sowing (development). And…we still believe business would be much, much, much better off using a service provider for their backups – especially if they truly care about the data on their file servers, exchange & SQL/MySQL servers. Especially, businesses who want to do online backups. They are better off doing it through a local trusted service provider, who provide more personalized managed services, rather than to a vendor who cannot afford to provide personalized managed services. The reason is simple:  Backup is not Skype. Business Backups require continuous monitoring and management which only a focused IT service provider can provide. No mass market vendor can provide that. Vembu Home will help us improve our brand and ‘business’ business – through service providers.

We also believe online backup doesn’t work for everyone & for all data. Hence the FREE local backup approach for Vembu Home. Of course, we hope the FREE bit will help build our brand – a la AVG. In fact, we will be taking elements of this approach (free / local / online / cloud etc) into a strong reseller play ‘model’ that we’ll be unveiling in a few months – it’s heady stuff. I know that sounded vague. I’d love to tell more but if I did at this time, I’d have to shoot you. Stay tuned for more on “Operation BoDerek”.

I think that about covers almost all we had to say. Any longer and this will be a book on Amazon.com

Thanks for reading. Still have questions? Feel free to post them below, and we’ll do our best.

PS: admit it – you were planning to lookup “Axillary Hyperhidrosis”.

The above post was written by Lakshmanan (Lux) Narayan of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.

Vembu Home is the only FREE consumer backup solution for free local backups and optional Amazon Cloud backups. Get your FREE COPY now.

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Posted in Amazon Cloud, New Release, Online Backup, Partner Program, Remote Backup, SMB, SP Edition, Vembu Home, Vembu StoreGrid



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Strange bedfellows

by lux on October 8th, 2009

This is a screen capture from an email newsletter I received from “Redmond Channel Partner Update”

Notice anything strange? Post / Ask in the comments if you do / don’t

MS weds google

Posted in General, Partner Program



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Interview by BackupAnyTime

by Sekar Vembu on January 17th, 2009

I was interviewed by John O’Neill of Ireland based online backup service provider BackuupAnyTime back in August, 2008. This was part of a series of interviews John was doing with executives from the data backup industry. One of our customers happened to read it recently and he wrote us saying it may be a good idea to post my interview in our blog or at least have a post with a link to that interview. He felt the views I expressed in the interview are quite relevant to our customer and partner base. So here is the link to the interview “Backupanytime interview with Sekar Vembu of Vembu technologies”

Hope you enjoy reading it.

Note: Backupanytime does not use our product, StoreGrid, for their backup service. I believe they use our competitor’s product.

The above post was written by Sekar Vembu of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.

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Posted in General, Online Backup, Partner Program, Remote Backup, SMB, SP Edition, Uncategorized, Vembu StoreGrid



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Google will abandon ‘pure SaaS’ and take the ’software plus services’ route – courtesy Microsoft

by Sekar Vembu on January 15th, 2009

So the inevitable is happening. At last, Google seems to be coming around to Microsoft’s software plus services strategy. The news that Google is opening up Google Apps for resellers is the first step in this direction. Pure SaaS sold directly to end customers would only go some distance. There are hundreds of thousands of SMBs out there who prefer to outsource their IT to a local IT Solution provider or a managed service provider (MSP). The only way to reach that segment of the SMB is through these IT solution providers. It was hence inevitable that Google came up with a channel strategy  – and they have done just that.

Where is the Software Plus Services play here? Not yet. But this is the beginning of the move towards Google adopting a ’software plus services’ strategy. Google will soon realize there are some large solution providers out there who would like to customize and host their Google Apps themselves and offer it to their customers. Additionally, there will also be large mid-market and enterprise customers (which is where most of the IT money is spent) who would like to customize their apps, integrate them with their business processes, and even host Google Apps internally and manage it themselves.  Microsoft offers on-premise, channel hosted, and Microsoft hosted solutions for their applications; Google will follow suit soon – the only thing is that Google comes into the ring from the opposite side  (of Microsoft) . In summary, no IT vendor however big, can afford to ignore a segment of the market because of some religious opposition to a business model. As Microsoft and Google start pushing their software plus services strategy, smaller vendors will follow suit.

My recent comments on an MSPMentor post: “Will Managed Service Providers Back Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint Online” -are quite relevant in the context of this subject…

“I think it is inevitable that Microsoft takes this hybrid approach with the SaaS model. But the market is so big there is always room for VARs and MSPs to add    value and win customers. In our experience in the SMB market segment we have dealt with two types of SMBs, the one who has internal IT and the one who     outsources it to a local VAR or an MSP. The latter segment is where VARs and MSPs have to cater to by building relationships with customers and also by becoming a trusted advisor/CIO of these small businesses.

Finally, there is no point fighting the tide. Microsoft cannot afford to cede a market segment to a salesforce.com or Google etc. So they need to do something to capture the market segment which is directly consuming applications from the SaaS vendor. That does not mean there is no value VARs/MSPs can add. I strongly believe there is probably 50% of the SMB market segment who are not comfortable with consuming business applications directly from the SaaS vendor. They would go to their local MSP/VAR who would bring in additional value so that these SMBs can focus on their core business.”

I think the complexity of IT is such that it is impossible for a large vendor to cater to all types of businesses. There is a big segment of the market that does not want to figure things out on their own and rather focus on their core business. They would rather outsource it to a trusted MSP/VAR to figure everything out and deliver a solution they could use.

In my opinion, Google is coming around to the same conclusion. Watch this space!

The above post was written by Sekar Vembu of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.

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Posted in Online Backup, Partner Program, Remote Backup, SMB, SP Edition, Uncategorized



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Fight the downturn by differentiating your business with improved services

by Sekar Vembu on October 15th, 2008

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.

The above post was written by Sekar Vembu of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.

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Posted in General, Partner Program, SMB, VARBusiness



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