Vembu Blog » Partner Program

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.

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.

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

lux — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 06:36:55 +0000

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.

Strange bedfellows

lux — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 07:03:58 +0000

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

… Read the rest

Interview by BackupAnyTime

Sekar Vembu — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 03:20:15 +0000

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.

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

Sekar Vembu — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 05:05:07 +0000

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!

Fight the downturn by differentiating your business with improved services

Sekar Vembu — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 02:16:19 +0000

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.

On the Road Again

lux — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 09:10:36 +0000

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

Forget with Confidence, Edit on demand

lux — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 08:29:36 +0000

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!

Houston, We have a Solution

lux — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 05:04:04 +0000

Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference, 2008 will be held in Houston, Texas between July 7 & 10. The exhibit hall will be open between July 8 & 10 and we’ll be there at Booth no. 1063 (yes its a big event; but no, they don’t have 1000+ booths)!

If you’re attending or if you’ll be in Houston (or thereabouts), it would be great to catch up and put faces to names. I’ll be there and so will Sekar Vembu, our CEO!

If you can make it, do let us know here.

While on the subject of tradeshows…

What other events do you suggest we attend? Xchange? SMBNation? HostingCon? We’re planning on attending a few select events and obviously wish to select those where we can meet our (existing & prospective) partners! Please give your suggestions in the comments below.

(someone asked me why we chose this title for this post)

Thank you, Calvin, for a SPARK of inspiration

lux — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 05:53:20 +0000

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!