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”.
