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Vembu Technologies acquires CloudNucleus – Enhances Cloud Based Data Protection services for Managed Service Providers and Managed Hosting Providers

lenin — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 01:55:00 +0000

We are really excited to announce our recent acquisition of CloudNucleus – an expert Continuous Data Protection technology developer with special focus on Disaster Recovery services for Windows, Linux and Virtual environments. We have known the CloudNucleus team for quite some time now and bumped into each other quite often since both the companies were catering towards the same segment with the vision to offer cost effective Backup and Disaster Recovery services. The synergy between our two companies was great and we thought it would greatly benefit our present channel of 2600+ Managed Service Providers and Managed Hosting Providers to better compete in the Disaster Recovery services market.

Addition of CloudNucleus strengthens our current Vembu offerings in the areas of Failover virtualization, P2V (Physical to Virtual Migration), P2P (Dis-similar hardware migration), Disk Imaging and Bare Metal Restore. Our partners have always been asking us for improvised support for offering enterprise class Disaster Recovery services and by this acquisition we proved our commitment to the channel one more time. Here’s what our CEO, Sekar Vembu said regarding this acquisition, “This combination is all about accelerating our ability to bring key functionality to our MSP and MHP partners. We’re combining best-of-breed storage technologies, two winning employee populations with similar reputations for customer focus, and two experienced management teams with highly complementary visions for the future of information management. This represents a significant win for the companies, our collective customers, employees and partners”

We intend to integrate the CloudNucleus technology offering into StoreGrid and deliver a unified Data Protection and Disaster Recovery software. We expect to have the first release of the integrated solution available during the end of October 2011.

“CloudNucleus’ employees, customers, and partners will see tremendous benefits from Vembu’s extensive partner community, expertise in data protection solutions for the MSP market, global presence and overall financial strength,” said Srivatsan Venkatesan, CloudNucleus’ founder and CEO. We will now have additional resources to further accelerate the development of solutions that fulfill our mission of delivering technology that enables our partners to deliver truly differentiated services to their customers.” added Venkatesan

Srivatsan Venkatesan will be joining the Vembu team as VP – Product Management and drive the Vembu’s product development initiatives and enhance StoreGrid’s support in the areas of Virtualization backup, Continuous Data Protection and instant failover virtualization during disaster recovery.

“This would add a great tool to our company’s present Backup and Disaster Recovery Offerings” said Ed Monacelli, president of EMCS, “We are upgrading all our clients over to Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plans and are confident to see an increased revenue from this integrated solution of Vembu and CloudNucleus”

We are confident that this acquisition will add more value to our existing channel partner base of both Vembu and CloudNucleus and enhance our core competencies to go after new set of customers. In case you have any questions regarding this acquisition, please feel free to mail us at storegrid-partner AT vembu DOT com

The above post was written by Lenin Srinivasan 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 Pro Online Backup Service allows Value Added Resellers and Managed Service Providers to offer online backup service to their customers without worrying about storage or hardware infrastructure.

Ask Not What You Can Do For Your Vendor, but What Your Vendor Can Do For You

mitch — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 09:08:57 +0000

Too often vendors have long and onerous requirements for their partners to “qualify” to them to sell their solutions. While I agree that it makes sense to set expectations between vendors and partners, vendors need to appreciate that partners are the feet on the street whose reputation is at stake every time they propose a solution to their customer. As Lenin mentioned in his last post, commitment to the channel is of paramount importance for any MSP or MHP because nothing causes more heartache than a vendor who ends up competing with their partners from time to time.

Beyond building a great technology platform, arguably the most impactful thing a vendor can do for his partners is to provide leads. As vendors implement broad marketing initiatives, they are invariably going to drive traffic from both partners and end users. How does a vendor capture this end user traffic and what does it do with it?

At Vembu, we now have link on our home page titled “Looking For Service Providers” which links to a form that helps end users connect with a service provider. If you have not already seen it, please check out the following link:

Looking for a Service Provider

The intent of this form is to gather leads from customers looking for help protecting their data and then to distribute those leads to our Service Provider partners quickly. Vembu will distribute these leads based on interacting with our partners and understanding which MSPs are best suited to respond to the lead based on geographic location and technical capability. Vembu is committed to helping our MSPs succeed. This is why we build and execute our roadmap based on partner input and why we want to help drive the successful services business with our partners.

The above post was written by Mitchell Cipriano 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 worldwide.

Convergence of Managed Services and Managed Hosting

lenin — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 01:06:58 +0000

With the StoreGrid’s recent granular integration with cPanel for domain backup and WHMCS for billing and provisioning automation, we headed straight to HostingCon 2011, San Diego to get feedback on these integrations from the hosting community. What we got was more than feedback; we received insight into how the industry is shifting. We personally spoke with more than 150 attendees who mostly comprised of hosting providers, Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and VARs. Many of the hosting providers who are currently offering pure hosting services that includes dedicated hosting, managed hosting, shared hosting, web hosting and VPN said they are looking at offering managed services including fully outsourced network management arrangements. During the show one MSP even asked “Hey! Do you see some convergence in the industry between hosting providers and MSPs?” Yes, many of the hosting providers whom we spoke with said they are planning to include managed services as a part of their short term business strategy. Of course there are hosting providers, who already have managed service offerings, but I am talking about pure play hosting providers stretching their business towards managed services and are optimistic about the lucrative opportunity.

So, what does this mean for Vembu? Hosting providers jumping in the managed services market have two major requirements. One is to backup the domains through their hosted control panel and the other is to offer a fully managed backup service for not just the data hosted in their data canter, but also for customers’ on premise data.

Below are some of the recent additions and enhancements in StoreGrid which makes it a compelling solution for both hosting providers and MSPs.

Granular integration with cPanel with the ability to perform restore from cPanel client console
Billing and provisioning integration with WHMCS
Comprehensive reseller management
Support for Disk Imaging, Bare Metal Restore and P2V (physical to virtual) on all windows machines
Ability to backup Virtual Machines (VMware and Hyper-V)
Integration with PSA and RMM platforms like ConnectWise and Autotask
and lot’s more….

We still have a long way to go to satisfy all the needs of both hosting and managed services industry and our team here at Vembu is hard at work to ensure we meet your needs. Soon you will hear about additional integrations and strategic partnerships that will benefit our partners including integration with Parallels Plesk, Level Platforms, Ubersmith etc…With our ever growing partner base it is important for us to understand even a small change in the industry and at any point in time we want our partners to stay ahead of competition. Please let us know your thoughts and needs.

Choosing the Right Partner

lenin — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 22:39:06 +0000

The demand for services is exploding and the opportunity is big, the only way to fully capitalize on this market is to partner with technology and service providers. The key is selecting the right providers for your customers and your business. As you think about services automation, server and desktop management, security, data protection and other aspects of your services business, you have to make strategic decisions about technology and service partnerships in order to provide the necessary range and quality of services to your customers. These partnerships will make or break your business. Selecting the right partners can help you to deliver high quality services and grow revenue while the wrong partners can cause support headaches, tarnish your reputation and result in customer churn. So how do you ensure that you align your business with partners who can help you meet the needs of your business and your customers’ businesses?

Choose Partners Who Listen—Find partners who evolve their features and define their roadmap based on the specific requirements of their customers. These partners will have regular communication with their customers through a variety of interactions. First, the partner’s support organization should have a formal feedback mechanism into product management and engineering to ensure that the customer’s voice is being heard. This goes far beyond fixing bugs and includes usability and functional evolution of the product. Second, look for partners who have formulated formal customer advisory boards and proactively reach out to their active customers to gather feedback on existing usability and functionality as well as input on the priorities of future releases. Finally, look for partners who have executive-to-executive interaction so they can stay apprised of the macro business issues and other factors affecting your business.

Channel Commitment Means Everything—Many companies like to talk about being channel focused, but the proof is in the pudding. Avoid working with companies that try to sell direct and through the MSP channel because invariably those companies will find themselves staring down the barrel of channel conflict. It is important to partner with companies that is transparent while dealing with channel partners. In addition, the company needs to understand the margin requirements of its channel partners and ensure that the discounting structure is clearly defined and handled in a consistent manner. Select partners who understand services and the MSP community. They need to appreciate recurring revenue and SLAs and the way YOU need financial and support arrangements to work.

The good news is that there are vendors who have a great reputation working with the MSP community. Vembu was founded on a culture of close communication with its partners. We realize that our MSP partners are living and breathing the customer experience every day and our goal is to support the product and drive the product roadmap based on what our partners need to grow their business. We established a Customer Advisory Board several months ago and we have had several very successful meetings where 70+ Vembu partners have shared their feedback on usability, new releases and future requirements.

Vembu understands the MSP marketplace and our pricing reflects the goal of consistent discounting with high margins to maximize the revenue for our MSP partners. We also live and breathe the MSP experience having built up a partner base of over 2500 MSPs. We know your business depends on your reputation and your ability to provide high quality service to your customers. Our commitment continues to be providing leading edge technology, great support and a roadmap that will keep you meeting the needs of your MSP customers now and in the future.

Offering a Managed Backup Service through Vembu StoreGrid

lenin — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 22:22:00 +0000

If you are planning to offer a Managed Backup service or already offering one then you got to watch the below video on what you have from Vembu to make you service offering better. Vembu – StoreGrid is an one off solution that clearly stands out of it’s competition in terms of better product, better company that understands the needs of Managed Service Providers and Managed Hosting Providers and delivers solutions based on their needs.

Some of the features that might be of important to you as a Managed Service Provider are listed below

Disk Imaging and Bare Metal Restore on all Windows Servers and Workstations
P2V capability where you can convert a physical machine to either an VMware or Hyper-V file
Support for backing up virtual machines (VMware and Hyper-V)
Centralized monitoring and management of clients and backup servers
Integration with leading PSA and RMM platforms like Connectwise, Autotask etc..
and lot’s more…

As a Managed Hosting Provider, you might be interested in knowing what’s cooking in here for you

Granular integration with cPanel and WHMCS
Ability to backup multiple domains / databases / files / settings hosted through cPanel
Single click restore of domains either through StoreGrid web console or cPanel console
Ability for billing and provisioning through WHMCS
Extensive support for backing up Linux and FreeBSD environments
and lots more…

For more information, please contact storegrid-partner@vembu.com or call us at 1-432-558-0055

Vembu Pro Online Backup Service allows Value Added Resellers and Managed Service Providers to offer online backup service to their customers without worrying about storage or hardware infrastructure.

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

8 Reasons to Build Your MSP Business Selling Data Protection Services

lenin — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 21:30:21 +0000

Expand Your Customer Base—Data Protection is one of the key strategic services you can offer and the SMB market is wide open for grabs. Every SMB would need backup solutions to protect their valuable data and most struggle with cumbersome, ineffective and insecure solutions. In addition, data protection is a strategic service that allows you to add value by providing one of the most sensitive and critical aspects of a company’s business. You can help your customers understand the trade-offs between RPO and RTO and the importance of understanding how to build a business continuity plan.

Generate Additional (Recurring) Revenues From Your Existing Customers — For break/fix customers as well as customers you have provided professional services, data protection services allow a natural expansion of your relationship to a model of recurring revenue and value. Many customers are looking for alternatives to traditional backup solutions and a managed service presents an attractive alternative.

Create Sticky Customers by Protecting and Storing Their Data — When you are protecting your customer’s data you have become an indispensable partner in their business. Hiring a new break fix VAR is easy; moving their data to a new data protection service provider is not. What’s more, if your customer finally gets a data protection service that works well and meets his RPO and RTO objectives they will not want to leave you.

Evolve Your Customer Relationships — Selling a strategic service like data protection allows you to completely change your relationship with your customer from being “another” vendor selling hardware/software, to being his “virtual CIO” making strategic recommendations and delivering critical business systems. When developing a business continuity plan, you will gain deep and broad understanding of customer’s business. This allows you to deliver even more value down the road.

Ride the Wave of Growth— One of the beauties of any service tied to data is that data typically grows at a minimum of 20% year over year. This means that your data protection service will grow by an average of 20% even if you don’t add new customers. That is why it is important to create a business model that is able to capture the data growth.

Increase Your Brand Value by Selling a Customized Offering — Promote the look and feel of your colors, your logo and your brand. This includes all customer-facing UI components as well as reports. This helps establish domain expertise for your company even if the majority of the technical expertise is coming from your service partner.

Leverage Existing Infrastructure— If you have made an investment in infrastructure you can leverage that investment by pointing your customer’s data to your data center. If you haven’t made that investment and don’t want to, you can point your customer data at your service provider partner and let them provide the hardware, software and operations staff, while you focus your energy on professional services engagements and sales.

It’s easy – An integrated console provides easy remote administration. Whether you want to be a master MSP managing other service providers or an MSP managing multiple customers, a centralized client management interface is crucial. The web-based console provides a wide range of control over both backups and restores. You can designate which functions are automated while still maintaining the ability to manage and monitor the entire backup and recovery process from anywhere and at any time. In a disaster situation, you can restore files over the web or perform complete bare metal restores of desktops or servers.

Summary

Data protection services are one of the most strategic and broadly applicable services you can sell. Vembu StoreGrid provides a world-class platform with tremendous flexibility for you to put together a flexible data protection practice with a suite of different packages meeting the needs of a range of customers. All of the solutions are fully brandable so you can present a single image to your customers and continue to build the value of your company. As customers look to move away from legacy backup solutions, your ability to provide a path forward for this ever growing space (both in terms of number of customers and data per customer) will make you the partner of choice for your small business customers.

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

Meet us at Interop– Las Vegas – May 8th to 12th 2011

lenin — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 04:09:55 +0000

We will be exhibiting at Interop Las Vegas which will be held from May 8th to 12th 2011 at Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas. If you happen to be in Las Vegas or in its vicinity during that time, please do stop by; we’re at booth #614. We would love to talk to each one of you in person. We will be demonstrating some of the latest advancements of StoreGrid in the cloud space. Contrary to “Whatever happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”, we’re sure that this technology hangover is bound to stay on for a long time, no matter wherever you are.

The folks at Interop sent us a special promo code through which you can get FREE EXPO PASS or 25% off on the conference pass. If you would like to get one, email us at storegrid-partner AT vembu DOT com

BTW, did you know ! Vembu Technologies is also recognized as finalist for Best of Interop 2011. InformationWeek Analytics and Interop Las Vegas 2011 Recognize Vembu Technologies for Market Leading Innovation. The Best of Interop Judging Committee, comprised of InformationWeek Analytics editors and analysts, reviewed over 100 entries and selected finalists based on the products with the most significant technical impact that are helping to move business technology forward.

See you there at the event and let us all share our experiences.

Vembu Pro Online Backup Service allows Value Added Resellers and Managed Service Providers to offer online backup service to their customers without worrying about storage or hardware infrastructure.

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

Frustrated from frequent unjustified price rise and product upgrades that never materialize?

lenin — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 22:33:47 +0000

Find out how to put a stop to this trauma by choosing Vembu’s time tested backup offerings. We welcome new Partners to the Vembu family with a Competitive Upgrade Offer. It’s been quite some time since we announced a competitive upgrade offer for customers who are evaluating StoreGrid and we believe now is the right time to get one out. Recently some good developments have been implemented in StoreGrid in terms of product features and functionalities like support for backing up VMware, Windows Hyper-V environments, Disk Imaging, Bare Metal Restore, Physical to Virtual Conversion etc…

Some of the key benefits you get by partnering with Vembu StoreGrid are listed below:

Benefit from a stable product with a comprehensive feature set that is built from the ground up to meet the requirements of Managed Service Providers and Value Added Resellers.
No need to worry about price or cost fluctuation like other competitors in the market as we have priced the product just right and that will allow MSP’s to offer enterprise class online backup service at a price that is well suited for SMBs.
Multi-tenant architecture with extensive ‘Reseller Management Feature’ with individual access roles for MSPs (Administrator), Reseller, Customer (IT Manager) and Clients.
Support for backing up Windows Hyper-V and VMware servers where you can take a snapshot of individual Guest OS. Priced at only USD 48 / socket per year – You can run an average of 12 – 15 VMs in a socket.
Extensive marketing support from a company who understands the MSP market much better than its competitors. Free product training, Successful Business case for MSPs, Free Marketing Materials etc.
Support for Web Services APIs to automate your billing and invoicing through any third party billing application.
Native Integration with PSA and RMM platforms like ConnectWise, AutoTask and many more
Simplified Adobe Flex based Interface for Desktops and Laptops.
We are a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner – Gold Competency in ISV, VMware Technology Alliance Partner and Redhat ISV ready Partner. This ensures we stay in tune with the latest technology updates and our product supports all the latest applications and new developments like Microsoft Exchange 2010 (Mail Level Restore), SharePoint 2010 etc.
And a lot more…

If you have made an investment in a competitor’s product and are suffering from frequent price rises without sufficient justification or inadequate feature set, this competitive upgrade will ease your move by 50% off your purchase. By partnering with Vembu, you can now benefit from a software solution that is trusted by more than 2500 Managed Service Providers worldwide.

Last but not least, you can enjoy our fanatical support (24 x 7 x 365) through Phone, email, Chat, IM, Remote etc… which means we allow you to focus on improving your business and profit margins while our support team helps you out with any technical assistance that you might need. You can check out some of our successful case studies here.

In case you need more details on this offer you can immediately call 1-432-558-0055 or send us an email to storegrid-partner AT vembu DOT com with the subject line “competitive upgrade”.

Vembu Pro Online Backup Service allows Value Added Resellers and Managed Service Providers to offer online backup service to their customers without worrying about storage or hardware infrastructure.

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

Vembu @ HostingCon2010

gokul — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 14:39:56 +0000

We are at the HostingCon 2010 in Austin, Texas and the atmosphere here is fantastic. We are excited about showing off the latest in Vembu StoreGrid for service providers.

Check out our booth #326, we’ll be showing off the latest in our product for managed hosting providers. A very good reason to do this is because Jay, our VP of Storage Services will be around to take questions on online backups and the latest in storage technology.

1) In the ‘latest’ category, the Flex Light interface for desktops and laptops is currently in beta and is soon to be released for production use. This is based on Adobe Flex for a snazzy user interface. You can download the Light Client for StoreGrid v3.1 over here.

2) Also, StoreGrid now sports Connectwise 2010 PSA integration for easy monitoring for service tickets. We are also working on integrating with WHMCS, AutoTask, TigerPaw and Level Platforms! Download the early beta here.

3) For our Hosting Provider partners, we are working on Plesk and cPanel integration for easy management of backups.

4) Currently StoreGrid supports virtual environment backups. We are integrating with VMWare and HyperV APIs for more comprehensive backup & recovery features for virtual machines.

Drop by our booth to register for early preview beta of these features. Booth Number: 326
Hope to see you in Austin – at our booth or around the Convention center!

The above post was written by Gokul Sriram 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.

Retro games making a ‘new’ comeback – in Google logo

lenin — Fri, 21 May 2010 18:34:54 +0000

Somewhere down my memory lane, I remember playing PAC-MAN as a coin operated arcade game. Can you imagine playing the PAC-MAN game in the Google logo? You can do that today and tomorrow in the special Google ‘Doodle’ that is out.

This special doodle was created in the honor of PAC-MAN’s 30th Birthday, where you can refresh some of your old 8-bit memories and play PAC-MAN in the Google’s first ever playable doodle. You can start playing the game by clicking the ‘Insert Coin’ button on the home page of the Google or wait for few seconds for the game to start automatically. One more item to note here, Google has managed to remove the ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button, where one of our old prophecy came true, atleast for the next 48 hours.

The PAC-MAN game has not done really bad either – it has kept up with the latest technologies. Since it initially made its appearance as an arcade game, it has made its appearance in PC, XBOX, PSP, and iPhone and now in the Google logo. This leaves me to expect a multi-player Cloud based PAC-MAN game for the PAC-MAN’s 31st Birthday. With Cloud Computing, I can visualize these cloud based retro games in the near future.

For Managed Service Providers, who would like to play PAC-MAN on the Google logo, enter the code ‘Online Backup Software’ on the Google Search box and then press the ‘Insert Coin’ button, aloha! your game is on!

Hurry up! This is only for the next 48 hours, then the ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button will come back and put you out of luck!

Google's new doodle PAC MAN

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