Backup & Beyond

This may be old hat to some of you, but I’m nevertheless excited about it!

Later today, we’ll be exhibiting at our first ever Virtual Tradeshow: the MSP Partners Virtual Tradeshow!

The event is scheduled between 9AM & 6PM, EST. Attendance is free; you simply need to sign up. Details on the event (including the free sign up link) are available here.

I heard that over 700 people had already signed up till 2 days ago!

So, if you haven’t attended one of these, drop in - at least for the experience of what a virtual trade show looks like.

I’ve posted a picture of our virtual booth here, and will try and post a video from the event later.

Virtually,

Lux

We recently attended the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference at Houston!

Two interesting things from the conference (that were not directly related to the event itself):

a) The StoreGrid demo we were running during the event had a StoreGrid server running on Amazon EC2 - with storage off Amazon S3. It worked flawlessly! Look out for a Beta of an ‘S3 capable’ StoreGrid - coming soon!

b) We’ve decided to ‘hit the road’ - and attend other relevant tradeshows/events to the extent possible. The best part about the Microsoft event was that it gave us the opportunity to meet many of our existing partners, put faces to names, and to understand their business & its associated requirements even better.

Towards having more sessions like these (and of course, recruiting new partners), we’ll be attending…

Hostingcon 2008 (we’re at Booth #104)

July 28-30, Navy Pier, Chicago, Illinois (Click here for more details on Hostingcon)

Comptia Breakaway 2008 (we’re at Booth #222)

August 5-7, Gaylord Palms Resort and Convention Center, Orlando, Florida (Click here for more details on Comptia Breakaway)

If you’re attending either of these events, please drop by and say hello! You can also schedule a meeting, in advance.

We also have 3 FREE passes to give away to our partners (currently using StoreGrid SP Edition) for the CompTIA Breakaway event (each pass is valued at approximately US$ 695). Partners have been sent an email on this, but here are the details once again…

If you’re interested in one of these 3 free passes, please email us right away at news AT vembu DOT com and type ‘Interested in attending CompTIA’ in the subject line of your mail.

We’ll select 3 names from the first 50 requests we receive or at 11.59 PST on July 29 - whichever comes first. Please ensure that you will definitely make it to the event if you win - we’d hate to see a pass go unutilized!

Please note that these passes cover the event only (a value of approx. US$ 695). You’d need to arrange for your travel, accommodation, etc - on your own. Additionally, if there are any other associated charges/fees levied by CompTIA or other bodies, you’d need to directly take care of these.

From what we’ve heard, these CompTIA events are quite interesting and educative!

Hope to see you in Chicago and/or Orlando! What events are you attending this year? Let us know, and we’ll try and be there

At times, I’m a ‘to do list’ freak!

I’ve even been guilty of writing up ‘to do lists’ consisting of tasks, some of which have already been completed - simply so that I can have the juvenile pleasure of ticking them as soon as I write them!

However, nothing beats the pleasure of ‘ticking off’ tasks that have been languishing in a to do list for far longer than you’d care to remember. We had the opportunity to do this earlier this week - with one of the (many) to do lists for the Vembu StoreGrid Online Backup Partner Zone…

You can now afford to Forget Your Password!

Everyday, we get up to 3 emails from partners who have forgotten their Partner Zone login name/password!

The (long pending) forgot your password feature is now up and allows you to immediately change your password, if required.

What’s more, we’ll also email you details on other members from your firm who are using the same partner zone account - so you can be nice, and let them know that they need to remember another obscure password!

The bigger piece of news: You can now Edit Build-O-Matic on Demand!

For various reasons, we’ve (so far) been ‘manually throttling’ the custom build creation process. As many of you know, each time you needed to make an edit to your custom build or create a new custom build - you needed to email us to get your form back to ‘edit’ mode. In fact, we get an average of two such requests every day - to set the form back into edit mode!

You can now do this yourself, i.e., set your form back to edit mode, as required!

Although the post title says ‘Edit on Demand’, please use your discretion when requesting new builds. We don’t have a formal cap on the number of edits you can do but since it ‘costs us’ a fair amount of bandwidth and storage each time Build-O-Matic churns out a new set of builds, we request you to be judicious about requesting new builds - that way, we’ll (hopefully) never need to place a cap on how many edits partners do.

Partners who have never forgoten their passwords and/or never edited their build settings probably won’t perceive these features to be even mildly interesting. I’m sure the others are probably cursing us for not introducing this earlier!

We’ve got a small team here that’s feverishly working on ramping up our reporting module ASAP. While we already have email reporting, alerts, events, etc, and a server dashboard that tells you about current backups, licensing, storage utilization, etc- we’re working on one key bit: a single screen that lets you look out for the ‘reds’ and take appropriate action!

I just had a look at the initial designs for this ‘work in progress screen’, and we’re about to decide on one of two. We’ve never been fans of long meetings and most of our decisions are fairly ‘obvious’ or are driven by our customers. So we thought we’d get the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ on this one too…

Which of these designs works better for you ( I won’t get into the details of each); just give us your ‘blink‘ reaction.

Important: These are in no way, finished screens - they’re more like ‘initial drafts’ ; however, they (hopefully) convey the broad ‘idea’…

Option 1: the table option

Option 2: the calendar option

Screenshot a (for option 2) - in Week view

Screenshot b (again, for option 2) - in Day view

Let me also toss in my 0.02 - I’m with Option 2!

Let us know your view ASAP in the comments below.

When we launched v2.2 (feels like ages ago), the big news was ‘Server Based Licensing’. A lot of partners had asked for this facility as applying license keys in each individual client installation was (obviously) painful. Our partner community also wanted the flexibility to add/remove clients without losing ‘fractions of licenses’.

A new licensing model was born; while new partners need to invest 10 minutes of their time into understanding it, older partners tell us they’re quite comfortable once they’ve got the hang of it. Admittedly, for a new partner, all the talk of SPEUs, mSPEUs (monthly SPEUs to the uninitiated) can be confusing - till you invest 10 minutes…

We’ve revamped the licensing overview slideshow and you can download the powerpoint show file here. We’ve just created a non animated version of this on slideshare. net

I’ve embedded a copy of the ppt below. Unless you’ve got Superman’s vision, some of the text will be impossible to read in the slideshow below. The best option then is to see the presentation directly on slideshare.net (where you can click on the ‘full (screen)’ button in the bottom right of the slideshow box - to see the ppt clearly) or simply download the pps.

What other demos/videos do you think we should make? Please give your inputs in the comments…

We recently named our partner program SPARK. We decided to give it a name as Vembu StoreGrid Service Provider Edition Partner Program was becoming quite a mouthful!

Why SPARK?

Of course, while we could have named it anything we wanted, it would be nice to have an acronym of sorts. We’ve placed our bets on Service Providers leading the way towards the boom in online backups amongst SMBs - what we call Service Provider Assisted Remote Backups ! But SPARB just didn’t sound right.

Here’s where Calvin & Hobbes come in. One of my strongest memories of the comic is the club they form - G.R.O.S.S.

G.R.O.S.S. is short for Get Rid Of Slimy girlS (Disclaimer: I am not and never will be a member of G.R.O.S.S.)

Coming back to S.P.A.R.B….taking Calvin’s example, we simply made Backups bacKups - and SPARK (Service Provider Assisted Remote bacKups) was born! Click here to know more about SPARK!

If you’ve read them before, you’ll probably agree that Calvin & Hobbes is one of those endearing comic strips that has the capacity to span generations- my sons regularly read it and right now, they love G.R.O.S.S. ; wait till they grow up - I anticipate a trend reversal!

The September issue of VAR Business has an interesting article on the “Top 5 Tech Segments SMBs Will Spend Money On”. While the first segment mentioned is Network Security, Backup & Archiving ranks number 2. Online Backup Services are especially mentioned and the article says:

Online backup services is also an area where resellers are starting to see increased interest in the SMB market, and vendors are now better enabling resellers to offer such services as part of their managed services portfolios—opportunities that can help them lock into recurring revenue streams.

We recommend that you read the article; however, if you’re strapped for time, here’s a summary…

The “Top 5 Tech Segments SMBs Will Spend Money On” are:

1. Network Security
2. Archiving & Backup
3. Client/Desktop Security
4. Network Infrastructure
5. Accounting / Supply Chain Solutions

Over half the SMBs polled said they expected to spend more on IT in the coming year. They are expected to spend US$ 13,000 (average per SMB) on IT in the coming year.

Also from the article:

62 percent of small businesses polled strongly agreed with the statement “technology is something that can create a genuine competitive advantage for my company.” That’s incentive for solution providers to show their small-business customers how technology translates to a competitive advantage, several resellers said.

True to its name, August has been a great month for us.

August 1: We were a finalist in Windows IT Pro magazine’s awards in the ‘Interoperability’ category, thanks to our ability to maintain a homogeneous look/feel across heterogeneous environments & operating systems - Windows, Linux (Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, Mandrake, Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu, SuSe), FreeBSD & Mac OS X.

I just realized how much has happened this month - on August 1, the other finalist in the Interoperability category, Xensource, had not yet been acquired by Citrix!

August 7: Red Herring announced their list of the 200 finalists for the ‘Red Herring 100 Asia’ - Asia’s 100 most innovative technology companies. We’d made it to the list of 200 finalists!

Today, August 30: Red Herring just put up the list of 100 winners, and…

WE WON!

From all of us here at Vembu Tech, Thank you dear partners & customers. We’ll save you the pain of reading through one of those ‘Oscar Acceptance’ like speeches, but honestly, with all your feedback, feature requests, brickbats & bouquets, you’ve really helped us stay innovative!

Coming to think of it, its been an August year…earlier this year, we also made it to CRN’s list of emerging vendors for our channel friendly practices!

I’m sure there’s something called the Weekend Law, and that it works hand in glove with Murphy’s, especially in the context of a software release. We were hoping to release v2.2 of the Service Provider Edition by March 10, 2007 and celebrate over the weekend!

It seems the bubbly will have to wait!

If memory serves me right, there were two previous instances where we aimed for a pre-weekend release and ended up working through the weekends, through to the next week.

The good news is: we did (in those two instances) have the releases the next week.

We’re currently shooting for (optimistic) March 12 / (pragmatic) March 14.

Thanks for your patience, and for all the feedback you’ve provided on the release candidate (approx. 1,200 mails were sent out last week announcing the release candidate and soliciting feedback); 2.2 is looking good

We’ve been speaking about v2.2 of the Service Provider Edition for some time. Many partners & customers have asked for more detail on the new features in this loaded version. While we’ve been providing bullet points & details on these new features, a picture is worth a 1000 words, and a video is worth a lot more (11,610,000 words to be exact, for this particular video- ask me why :-))

The video below is a You Tube version. If you’d like a more hi-res (16MB) version, please download the Windows Movie (.wmv) file from here (please right click the link and choose “Save Link As…” or “Save Target As…”)

We’d love your feedback, and hope you’re as excited about 2.2 as we are. As someone rightly mentioned in our forum, considering the number and kinds of improvements, we should have called it v3.0 !

Oh, it’s there on the video but let me tell you here anyway - we’re currently 2 weeks into the testing process, are looking at a release date of March 10, and expect to have the release candidate available by March 3. Fingers crossed; thanks for your patience!

Vembu StoreGrid Service Provider Edition v2.2 - A Preview