Vembu Blog » SMB

StoreGrid created a win-win solution for Got It Back

vidhya — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 16:36:20 +0000

“Vembu StoreGrid makes our job way easier because it gives all kinds of option to do basic file backup and specialized backups like exchange, SQL, VM backup etc. You can perform DR scenarios where you can actually restore entire servers within minutes.”

Jason Steuernagel, Got It Back LLC

The Challenges

The advent of virtualization and cloud technologies has changed the Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) picture dramatically in the SMB space. Managed Service Providers offering backup services face a greater challenge to provide Backup & Disaster Recovery Solution which is not only automated completely but also reliable and flexible to the ever growing demands of their business customers.

The Solution

Due to increase in virtualization and cloud technologies adoption, Service Providers need to identify a Backup & Disaster Recovery solution which offers high-performance backup with multiple restore options to cater to different categories of customers. They also have the onerous task to lookout for a product which constantly improves to meet the emerging data protection and disaster recovery needs of evolving businesses.

The StoreGrid Benefit

Vembu StoreGrid offers a compelling recipe for addressing the technical and economic barriers to broaden Cloud Backup and Virtualization based disaster recovery adoption in SMB. In particular StoreGrid attracted SMBs as it allowed them to perform virtualized disaster recovery shrinking the CAPEX required with traditional DR.

See a real MSP talk about all this and more of his experiences of solving the challenges with StoreGrid in this video case study.

At Vembu, we not only believe in offering a profitable partner channel program but also constantly listen to valuable inputs from our partners to continuously improve the product.

Feel free to take a closer look at our latest edition StoreGrid 4.2 to learn more.

Launching Cloud Content Management Service for Channel Partners – SYNCBLAZE

N Sai — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 22:39:35 +0000

The year 2012 is shaping up to be a defining moment for Vembu’s cloud services portfolio. We are immensely delighted to announce the launch of the business focused edition for our cloud content management solution – SyncBlaze! With this premier solution, we hope to make it easier for solution providers serving the small and midsize business market to offer robust, cost-effective, high performance content management solutions in the cloud. We believe that there is a strong demand for this productivity boosting proposition from businesses adopting the cloud paradigm.

We now have diverse options suiting the different market segments – Zukmo for Consumers and SyncBlaze for MSPs/VARs and we are in the process of bundling the SyncBlaze service as an on premise edition for channel partners interested in hosting the services within the bounds of their infrastructure and storage domains.

FREE TRIAL

We have introduced a free trial period of 30 days for our service providers which enables them to go for a test drive and get a hands-on feel of this service. For trying out our service, MSPs just need to fill up the minimal information requested in the SyncBlaze channel Signup page. The SyncBlaze support team will then connect with the respective Resellers and guide them in registering their accounts. Our company home page will also be redesigned in the near future to reference all our cloud solution offerings and it will provide for a way to redirect interested parties to the registration page.

We will soon be sharing the details on Pricing in our website.

KEY FEATURES

A number of core features in Sync Blaze are based on the functional adoption of its predecessor and popular customer oriented offering, Zukmo, which has been packaged and branded for business suitability.

The main features for the business edition are as follows:

Enables your customers to securely store all types of business content with version control.
Facilitates simplified file sharing with employees/clients etc. without the need for Emails/FTP/ Shared File servers to exchange business critical documents.
Provides Universal Access from any Workstation, iPhone, Android, iPad etc. through the mobile web platform, desktop utilities and browser extensions.
User friendly Collaboration for multidisciplinary teams to view/edit files instantly
Offers a centralized searchable repository for all end user content – Files, Web content, Notes, Google Apps Docs, Emails & Social media
Collect and Organize tagged Google Apps Docs, Emails, Notes, RSS feeds, Bookmarks, Social & Embedded media
Reseller and Customer Administration module for control and configuration
Powered by Amazon AWS – HIPAA, SOX & PCI Compliant infrastructure.

For starters, we have a Features page with a snapshot of the capabilities and also a more detailed Learn More section that covers each of the features in greater depth. We will also be featuring a series of blog posts covering the important functionalities in more depth with relevant information, illustrations and videos in some cases. Also, watch our blog space for more product updates.

During the past couple of months, we have been connecting and conversing with some of the partners who had expressed interest in providing SyncBlaze as a value added service to their customers. We hope to be aggressively marketing and communicating with many more partners & resellers to increase the brand awareness and also to strongly leverage their suggestions, requests and feedback to further refine our product development roadmap.

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.

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.

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

Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Backup and Restore with StoreGrid

arul — Fri, 28 May 2010 09:03:49 +0000

With the release of StoreGrid v3.1 SP1, StoreGrid now supports Exchange Server 2010 database backup and restore. The v3.1 SP1 patch should be installed on both the backup server (and replication server) and in the client machines running StoreGrid v3.1. Remember this patch installs only on top of StoreGrid v3.1 installations.

Exchange 2010 Backup Restore

VSS based backup of Exchange 2010

Unlike Exchange Server 2000, 2003, 2007 where StoreGrid uses Exchange Server’s ESE API (Extensible Storage Engine) for backing up live Exchange databases, in Exchange 2010 StoreGrid uses VSS (Volume Shadow Copy Services) based APIs. StoreGrid invokes the “Microsoft Exchange Writer” (comes with the Exchange 2010 Server) which provides the backup of the live Exchange databases in a consistent state.

During the Exchange 2010 Server backup, the VSS is used to create a snapshot of the database and log files pertaining to the databases configured for backup and those files are then saved locally in a temporary location. Once all the relevant files are saved in the dump location, StoreGrid will report to the VSS that the backup is complete and the VSS will then purge the log files. StoreGrid will then backup the dumped files to the backup server and will delete these files from the temporary location.

Efficient as always..

Though the way Exchange provides its backup data may be different in Exchange 2010 server, but to StoreGrid users, Exchange 2010 Server backup and restore will work exactly the way Exchange 2000, 2003 and 2007 backup and restore work. The process continues to be slick and efficient as always:

1. Only incremental changed data is dumped during the incremental backup and not the entire Exchange database

2. Even within the incremental data that is dumped, StoreGrid backs up only the changed blocks by running StoreGrid’s Intelli-Delta on the incremental log files

3. Backup data files are deleted from the dump location once the backup is completed.

What is next in StoreGrid for Exchange Server Backups

We continue to make enhancements to Exchange Server Backups since we know that it is one of the most important service offerings for our MSP partners. Here are some the enhancements that is in near roadmap

1. Mail Level Restore – Specific emails from can be restored and attached into the Exchange Server.

2. Synthetic Exchange full backups – During additional full backups only the incremental backup data with respect to the previous full backup is sent to the backup server. Large Exchange Server data can be first seeded from the Exchange Server machine to backup server using StoreGrid’s seeding (export/import) feature and then later all additional full backups can be Synthethic Full Backups.

3. ‘Copy Only’ local backup – StoreGrid client can be configured to do regular weekly or monthly full ‘Copy Only’ backup of the entire Exchange Server, while it continues to run its incremental/differential backups to the offsite backup server. The ‘Copy Only’ backup will not set the archive bit on the Exchange Server, therefore letting the offsite backup to continue running its incrementals.

4. Incremental/Differential Exchange backups both locally and to remote backup server – We have also started working on providing the ability for the StoreGrid client to backup both locally and to a remote backup server in the same backup schedule.

Want to learn more about Exchange Server Backups and Restore using StoreGrid?

Please refer the following URLs:

http://www.storegrid.com/online-backup/sp-help/PageHelp/exchange-backup-configuration.html

http://www.storegrid.com/online-backup/sp-help/PageHelp/exchange-server-restore-configuration.html

http://www.storegrid.com/online-backup/sp-help/PageHelp/exchange-recovery-database-restore.html

http://www.storegrid.com/online-backup/sp-help/PageHelp/exchange-mailbox-rights.html

http://www.storegrid.com/online-backup/sp-help/PageHelp/exchange-mailbox-backup-configuration.html

http://www.storegrid.com/online-backup/sp-help/PageHelp/exchange-mailbox-restore-configuration.html

The above post was written by Arul Prabhu 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.

IT Requirements of SMBs

lenin — Fri, 14 May 2010 12:06:35 +0000

Is the SMB market ripe enough for IT Service Industry, especially in a recession environment? While large companies had a rough sledding through the recession, SMBs made a relatively good financial progress.

SMBs – Steering well in rough seas

Here’s an excerpt from the May 1st Edition of Wall Street Journal : “Like most companies, smaller firms used the global crisis to pare costs and trim inventories. They are running lean nowadays and have relatively strong balance sheets, with more cash and less debt as a percentage of market capitalization than do large companies, according to Standard & Poor’s data. Also smaller companies tend to thrive most during low-interest-rate environments, when they don’t have to pay much to get capital to fuel their growth—the very conditions that have prevailed in the U.S. for much of the past decade”.

Now this means a huge potential for the Hosted IT Services to the SMBs

Now let’s take a closer look at the SMB market and the impact of Information Technology. According to a recent Survey from Microsoft, Small and Midsize Businesses using Hosted Services have shown better financial performance. Of the Small and Midsize Businesses that viewed IT as a critical element, 60% of them saw their revenues grow in the past 12 Months (i.e. 2009). In contrast, among the SMBs who viewed IT as insignificant, less than 29% saw an increase in revenue. Now, this is makes the point very clear that IT services have a positive impact on SMBs.

YIPPEE! – Cloud Computing

Contrary to my previous blog on ‘SMBs reaction to Cloud – A Pro/Con Analysis’ where I focused on the point that SMBs are reluctant to cloud, I am finding this climate to be changing. According to the Microsoft 2010 index, Small and Midsize businesses are starting to see the benefits of Cloud Computing and more than 40% of respondents that used Cloud Computing technology reported a revenue rise of more than 30%. SMBs see Cloud Computing as an effective platform for IT Management, Maintenance and reduced operation cost.

How to solve the IT Requirements of SMBs effectively? – Give what they want!

Whether it is E-Mail, File Sharing, Data Backup, CRM, Website Hosting or E-Commerce, roughly ~50% – 70% of SMBs have their IT Services On-Premise and ~20% – 30% of them have it hosted and ~10% – 20% don’t have these IT Services at all. If we see Data Backup in particular, almost 71% of SMBs have their Data Backup installed On-Site and 22% of them have them hosted on a Offsite Server and nearly 7% of them don’t have Data Backup at all.

Now this being the case, if you are trying to pitch your offsite backup solution to a customer who has his present backup data on-site, it’s going to be difficult winning the customer until he completely trusts your solution. The best way to handle this situation is to propose a hybrid backup solution model, where there will be a local copy of backup data on the customer’s premises and the backed up data is then optionally replicated to an offsite server / cloud platform for additional redundancy. Online Backup Software like Vembu StoreGrid can be deployed as a Managed On-Premise Backup Solution for customers who prefer that option and the backed up data can be optionally replicated to an offsite replication server in a co-lo facility or a Cloud Platform like Amazon Web Services. This becomes a win-win situation for the SMB as well as the Service Provider as this kind of a hybrid backup model is mutually beneficial.

These research reports say one thing very clearly that Small and Midsize Businesses show greater awareness to the benefits of IT and indicates a clear path towards better financial performance for those who take advantage of IT advancements such as hosted services. The SMB market is really big and hot out there for IT solution providers or the managed service providers and what is needed is the right strategy and execution to win big.

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

The Path to SMB customers – a Treasure Hunt

lenin — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 09:47:09 +0000

Reaching out for SMB customers has more or less become like a treasure hunt for IT Industry folks. We know that there is a pot of gold at end of the tunnel. But the real problem is that we may not have the treasure map – the right path that will lead us to them.

Why it is difficult to reach SMBs.

Every adventure trip has its own challenges. SMBs are typically run by tight entrepreneurs, who are conservative in terms of budget and may not venture out into adopting new technologies without getting absolutely convinced of its ROI. SMBs are slow adopters of new technologies and require expert assistance on lots of IT-centric business solution areas. Despite these problems, every IT vendor wants to crack the SMB market by spending lots of marketing money ($$$) in online advertising and other mediums trying to reach the SMBs directly – Hold On! – Is that the right path? Truth is, even the mighty Microsoft and Dell realized that the effective way to reach out for SMBs is through the Channel.

Why Channel Partners have an upper hand with SMBs.

The Channel Partners, also known as, IT Service Providers, Managed Service Provider, Value Added Resellers and System Integrators etc… provide an effective way to Garden the IT requirements of SMBs and are in the best position to service them. The SMBs who don’t have the necessary resources in terms of time and money in managing their in-house IT rely on a trusted service provider who can act like their internal IT department. This local trusted service provider is in the best position to understand the SMBs business and provide the most suitable and cost effective IT solution and tailor them to to suit the customer’s business goals.

Only the local service providers can be the link between the vendors like us and the SMBs because they are in the best position to understand the SMB customers business needs to deliver the most relevant and cost effective IT solution by providing the necessary service in terms of the installation, training, on-going maintenance and support.

With that said, we may conclude that the best way to crack into the SMB market is through the channel! But even for the service providers, there are many challenges in growing their business – Let’s explore it!

Are the Service Providers always successful in reaching out to SMBs?

Most of the Service Providers consider ‘Marketing or Selling’ their services to SMB customers a critical pain point. Even though the service providers mostly do relationship selling to their SMB customers, there still seems to be some challenges in marketing relevant IT solution to them. Mentioned below are some quick tips that might help the service providers to identify some common mistakes and areas of improvement in their marketing activities

• Service Providers are prone to overstuff customers with loads of information and technical specifications, while what businesses look for is a solution that will make their task of running their business easier. SMB’s don’t have time to sift through marketing materials and pages and pages of descriptions. A marketing message to SMBs must be simple and straightforward. This point is succinctly put by Justin Crotty, Vice President Services North America at Ingram Micro Inc., in a guest blog post titled “Managed Services: The Value Is the Service” at the MSPmentor.

• The Pain Points for SMBs is how to sign up more new customers thus increasing the revenue and also how to reduce their operating cost . Focus your marketing message on these Pain Points and show how you can either help them improve their process of signing up new customers or how you can help them reduce their operating costs.

• Focus on how you are going to implement a solution and its impact on ROI instead of how exactly the product or service functions. For example if you are marketing an online backup solution to your customers, one thing that you need to focus on is how backing up to an off site location is better in terms of protecting critical business data and also how the total cost of ownership is much more attractive than a traditional backup solution.

• Avoid buzzwords like cloud hosting, Grid Computing etc…, many a non-IT domain SMB may neither understand nor care to learn

• Include customer testimonials on all your marketing messages demonstrating on how a local business is benefited from your service. This will have a notable impact on your marketing efforts.

Like every adventure trip, the path for reaching out to SMBs is full of traps and pitfalls. If you discover the right path you can win big.

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

Only the local service providers can be the link between the vendors like us (http://www.storegrid.com) and the SMBs because they are in the best position to understand the SMB customers business needs to deliver the most relevant and cost effective IT solution including providing the necessary service in terms of the installation, training, on-going maintenance and support.

New! StoreGrid supports backing up to Amazon QC2 – Quantum Computing Cloud

lenin — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 13:50:15 +0000

We at Vembu Labs have been working closely with the latest breakthroughs in storage and computing technology to keep StoreGrid ahead of the tech curve. For instance, we were among the earliest to adopt Amazon EC2/S3 services for data backups – as soon as Amazon removed the Beta tag on the Amazon Cloud!

Vembu StoreGrid and Amazon Web Services have been working closely on a new technology – and the time is right for us to talk about StoreGrid’s support to Amazon’s QC2 service (Quantum Computing Cloud). This ground breaking solution makes use of qubits (or quantum bits) for manipulating the data states probabilistically and using them for backing up data. This enables users to achieve unprecedented levels of RTO’s and RPO’s using StoreGrid QMI (Quantum Machine Image) for data backups.

Amazon’s Quantum Computing Cloud (QC2) will be hosted on select Availability Zones within Amazon Data Centers. The core of these qubit-enabled backups has been implemented using StoreGrid’s new technology called StoreGrid ET^TM (StoreGrid Entanglement).

This technology relies on Quantum Entanglement phenomenon that allows transfer of data as quantum energy from the client over to the server without traversing the intervening space by manipulating the data states probabilistically. This means that data transfer will take place a whole lot faster to your Quantum Backup Server without being hampered by bandwidth restrictions like T1 lines.

With this new technology, StoreGrid allows data to be transferred to Amazon Quantum Cloud at very high speeds without requiring any internet or physical data connections. This new version of StoreGrid is currently under Beta and is already available to some of our MSP partners who have been actively testing it out.

Here is what our VP, Storage Systems; Sathish Subramanian has to say about this new release.

“We consider this innovative usage of qubits for data backup to be a giant leap in data communication & storage technology and will change how the industry looks at data backups and restores.”

For Service Providers, this new release means that their customers can now backup ANY data to Amazon Quantum Cloud without worrying about storage space and bandwidth etc. We are working on the pricing model for this new technology and expect to release the pricing for this new release by end of this month.

What are you waiting for!

Click here to download your 360 day free trial today!

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

Moving on…

sathish — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 16:45:33 +0000

In response to our competitor’s willingness to stop the blog war, we want to reiterate that as a company we do not like to indulge in blog wars or any unwarranted mudslinging. We were just provoked by RBS’s constant focus in attacking our product and company without full understanding of what we are. We apologize if we hurt anyone personally in this avoidable blog war.

As a company we are down to earth to the point that we even feel uncomfortable beating our own drums leave alone indulge in mudslinging or attacking a competition with creating FUD about them. We feel that the best judge of a product/solution or a business itself is the customer in a competitive marketplace. And we will simply continue to relentlessly focus on proving ourselves by delivering a world class product accompanied by a world class service.

The above post was written by Sathish Subramaniam, Director of Engineering, 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.

On Paternity Claims and Sundry Other Rants…

gokul — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 06:27:18 +0000

I ran into an especially long-winded post in a competitor’s blog – it is very confused even by the standards of someone who claims paternity for the ‘online backup industry’. Initially, I thought it was just the phrase ‘online-backup’, but later it transpired that it was the whole industry for which parentage was being claimed. Much the same thing happened with me when one day in 1993, I asked my friend near the refrigerator, ‘(We) Got Milk?’ and thereby INVENTED the phrase ‘Got Milk?’. AND pasteurization. AND the whole dairy industry. Giggle.

I wouldn’t have written this post hadn’t it been certified as ‘good entertainment’ and a ‘GREAT sport!’ by the CEO of Remote-Backup.

Firstly, I thank Rob for his admission about the goof-ups he has made in his claims on our product in his website (yes – you read it right. Stuff written about STOREGRID on RBS website; I too didn’t believe it when I heard! Note: this is not their forum I am talking about here). But surely sir, it beats me why there should be pages and pages of RBS’s ill-conceived notions and baseless opinions on Vembu StoreGrid on your website.

Admitting two of the baseless comments that are hosted on your site is commendable, but it still leaves a lot to be desired.

Wait, the post gets better. He goes on to claim that he studied Buddhist and Hindu philosophy (!). Too bad I don’t know what these are, because it could have prepared me for what came on next. What then followed was an absolutely hilarious exposition of his philosophy using an analogy of climbing mountains, snow, gravity and few other sundries. But I was left truly impressed with the vivid analogy actually. Honest.

(Note to self: Re-read the analogy for tips when packing for next trekking trip).

Somewhere in the depths of these mysterious oriental philosophies that Rob has mastered, perhaps lie the reasons for keeping a closed forum for RBS partners. I am not going to unearth any meaning out of the following quote – except maybe note that it sounds suspiciously like a convenient excuse for keeping adverse partner comments ‘private and privileged’ or maybe that the forum is way too dull to be admitted publicly.

“Vembu’s forum is used for technical support, including support of evaluation customers and those who are not Service Providers. Mine is not. Vembu relies on help from their few service providers to offer support. I do not. My forum is specifically intended for my own Service Providers to swap ideas and resources about marketing, business practices, pricing, and yes, some technical issues. But it is not used for technical support, and the conversations therein are private and privileged among RBS Service Providers only, and not the general public. Therefore, my Service Provider’s Forum should be private. “

One can only conclude that all the aforesaid philosophies in the repertoire of the esteemed author didn’t include any injunctions on ‘Free Speech’. So much for claims of being the only American firm in an imagined competitive array – or perhaps there is an exception for those with paternity claims on the whole thing lock, stock and barrel.

It’s not geography, but the spirit with which one works that matters.

On the contrary, the Vembu StoreGrid forum is home to lively discussions on all topics listed above and not just technical issues (and since the forum is open, one can actually verify this!). But yes, we haven’t had a thread on philosophy yet though. Nor one on trekking uphill in the snow…

As for our technical support, the Vembu technical support team works 24×7 for both our partners and prospective (evaluating) partners. Our technical support includes support through email, phone, instant messenger and remote sessions. We have never informed our evaluating service provider partners that technical support is only through forums. StoreGrid users will vouch for the fact that on occasion, even premium support options like telephone/remote sessions have been offered to partners and evaluating partners alike for their convenience.

I was especially struck by this gem of reasoning and the judgment passed on our technical support.

“Vembu relies on help from their few service providers to offer support.”

Merely the fact that there are technical posts in our forum doesn’t mean that we rely on partners to resolve technical queries. What matters is that most of our partners think otherwise. We in fact enjoy the healthy debate and learning opportunities created by these forum threads. I pray that similar galloping sallies of mental reasoning such as the above haven’t creeped into to the inner workings of the RBS software.

“My customers like it that way, and actually pay to have access to it (the forum).”

Tee Hee. Here’s where I started seriously thinking if he had been just pulling the readers’ legs all along.

What prompted me to write this post after a good deal of deliberation is this fact – I have reason to believe somebody from RBS personally plagued our technical support and partner relations teams today. For one, our technical support faced an unusual query on our internal processes on a support ticket coming from one rob@remote-XXXXXX.com. Next, one of my colleagues in the partner relations team received a call with inquisitive queries on our internal process from someone who towards the end of the call claimed to be the ‘President of Remote-Backup Systems’. I fail to see how this qualifies as ‘great entertainment’ or even a good sport.

P.S. We value legal copyrights and have used only paid images in all of our marketing collateral including our blogs. Another example of jumping the gun in concluding something adverse on Vembu.

P.S.2 Let us focus on the product and servicing our partners and let the market decide who deserves to be in business.

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.