Vembu is attending two important industry events in February:

Parallels Summit
Orlando, FL
February 14-16

Booth #425

The Parallels Summit, being held at the Gaylord Palms Resort in Orlando Florida, will provide a gathering place for the who’s who of the hosting industry.  If you are at the show, be sure to come by our booth because we are announcing  a major product for the hosting industry at this show.  We are focusing on data protection for Managed Hosting Providers in order to what we see as weaknesses in current solutions.  Managed hosting providers have a unique challenge in that they need to protect large farms of physical servers that house a much greater percentage of virtual environments.  They need high-speed data protection solutions that don’t impact the performance of the environment.  In addition, they need flexibility to perform cloud migration when necessary due to a variety of factors including geographic requirements, outages, economic factors, etc.

CloudConnect
Santa Clara, CA
February 13-16
Booth #914

The Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California is hosting  CloudConnect. This event has become the place for all the latest information about cloud computing.  Vembu is also making a major product announcement at this show.  Today,  SMBs are looking for solutions that allow them to share content and collaborate and also fully protect all their applications and systems.  Managed Service Providers need to stop by our booth and see how how they tap into this opportunity without becoming data protection experts and with minimal investment.

Vembu will have product experts at both of these events providing live demonstrations and to answer all your questions about how to build a thriving high margin cloud services business focused on data protection and cloud management.  Please drop us a line and let us know you are attending one of these events so we can make a special effort to connect with you and talk about your cloud services business.

The good news is there is a great solution to this problem and Vembu has invested significant development resources to ensure complete integration.  The answer is Professional Services Automation (PSA) tools like Autotask and Connectwise.  Leveraging a PSA tool will allow you to dramatically reduce the time it takes you to do your billing, easily generate professional service reports, improve accuracy and eliminate billing errors, and improve your client’s overall satisfaction.

Leveraging a PSA tool is extremely helpful when building your data protection service because it will enable you to implement a web accessible and sharable calendar and time tracking system.  This will allow you to ensure your services staff accurately records their time.  Accurate tracking of this information will help you charge your customers correctly and completely and also ensure you’re your staff is performing at the levels you require.  That is why it is important to track the work that is billable, work included with monthly support plans or even work that isn’t billable such as attending a training course on how to implement a hybrid data protection solution for your clients.

Once you have all the information in the system, you can now generate reports, invoices and billing.  This also allows you to track your monthly performance levels prior to the end of the month so you have time to take corrective action if necessary.  You can also easily generate comprehensive service reports for your clients on demand.  Once you are accurately tracking all the time, you can better project monthly performance levels before it’s too late to take corrective action. You can also easily and instantly print comprehensive service reports for your clients on demand.

PSA tools will not only help you with your staff, but it will also help your customers.  PSA will provide your customer a secure access portal where they can submit and track their own tickets.  If you train your customers how to use the portal, they will be more likely to report issues to you in a manner that  is less disruptive to your business and you will find out about issues more quickly which will result in faster problem resolution.  Your clients will also appreciate the added transparency of knowing what work is being done and how long it took.  This will help you meet your SLAs because support incidents won’t get lost and you will be able to track them from inception to resolution more effectively.

Vembu wants to help you build a thriving data protection services business.  Leveraging a quality PSA tool like Autotask and Connectwise can help you stay focused on delivering the best possible service because it dramatically simplifies the time tracking and billing aspects of the business.  For more information on how Vembu integrates with Autotask, look for an invitation to our joint webinar in the month of October.

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.

Fast forward to 2010 – The Thomas Jefferson University Hospital is on Facebook connecting to its users.  The doctor my friend knew would be overjoyed to hear this.  The Facebook page has invites to screening events, announcements for speeches and lots more information*.   And with Facebook expected to close in on 500 million users next month, there is no doubt that cloud based social networking solutions (Facebook, Twitter etc.) are heaven-sent for consumer organizations who want to redefine their interaction with users (and successfully beat the competition in the process too).

CRN mentioned this recently as a successful example of ‘Consumerizing’ the Cloud – while also mentioning other medical players like Kaiser Permanente which lets patients to select and swap doctors while rating them as a user community.

The dizzying growth of social networking sites has been questioned quite a lot in the past.  Umair Haque asks,

“If we take social media at face value, the number of friends in the world has gone up a hundredfold. But have we seen an accompanying rise in trust?”

Most of the social networking solutions using the Cloud (e.g. tons of Facebook apps now run on the Amazon Cloud) are rarely about ‘trust, connection and community’ and are more about attention grabs and clicks. This recent development by Thomas Jefferson University is like a whiff of fresh air in the hodgepodge that is ‘social networking’ these days.

What does this mean for other organizations which think they are missing the bus by not being on ‘social media’? – I believe that organizations that take Cloud based social networking solutions seriously and redefine their model of reaching out and offering services to customers will be leaders in their field while their counterparts who simply choose to fiddle with social-media ‘presence’ instead will be left behind.

* – I admit Facebook is not a prime example for illustrating this point; what with Facebook’s shooting itself in the foot with privacy settings and the recent flak that it has received. Needless to say, any implementation of ‘consumerizing’ the Cloud should ensure that no user medical information is ever entrusted to Mr. Zuckerberg or to a Facebook app!

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.

Malcolm Gladwell’s famous 10,000-hour rule has caught the fancy of a lot of people.   The book attempts to question our definition of ‘success’ and to find out a pattern behind ‘outliers’.  Gladwell goes to explain the careers of really successful people – accomplished and extraordinary persons who are outside of ordinary experience.

A recent post by Joe Panettieri from MSPMentor summarizes this book as –

* First, greatness in anything requires talent combined with 10,000 hours of practice.

* Second, you need a series of lucky or fortunate breaks, often based on your surroundings, to get those 10,000 hours of practice.

The interesting part is where Gladwell attributes the ‘success’ of successful people to factors beyond their control -  like the month of birth of hockey players in their consequent success in that sport.

I think that Gladwell’s theory -

(1) gives a raw deal to the role of self-awareness during those 10,000 hours and

(2) at the same time, it goes too far with ascribing success to ‘things that the individual has nothing to do with’

(3) doesn’t highlight the evolution of the individual that it brings on the path to success/wherever it leads (this might be intentional)

Bill Joy may have programmed over 10,000 hours, but the Bill who wrote code in the 100^th/200^th hour would have been a very different person from the one who wrote code the 10,000^th hour.   What is simply written off as ‘practice’ is actually, at closer inspection, a conscious effort that results in the evolution of the ‘practitioner’.

When we look at the case of an MSP starting out her business, Gladwell’s 10000-hour rule holds well – in the sense of time spent in sustained and conscious effort.   Like any other human enterprise, an MSP too requires talent and ’10,000 hours’ of effort to become successful.  I wouldn’t go as far as including ‘chance’ as one of the determinants of success.  As long as the efforts have been ‘conscious’ and result in constant evolution of the individual, I hold that failure of any sort is impossible.

To see this, simply count the number of businessmen you know who have clocked well over the 10,000 hours of practice in their chosen field of operation and have not yet reached the desired level of ‘success’ in their field.  What could be attributed to a lack of ‘lucky breaks’ can just as easily be described as a lack of awareness when logging in those hours at work.   To be fair, such awareness requires an almost inhuman brutal honesty, of a cold-shower-water-splash-in-the-face kind when it comes to evaluating oneself and one’s efforts.

I believe that when one is equipped with such awareness, the other et ceteras of success will come naturally to the practitioner – even Dame Luck will prefer your company (pun intended)!

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.

“I don’t want to sound arrogant. It is not lack of time. I am pretty jobless trying to figure out ways to scale our company trying various new things. The problem is the serious lack of interest in pitching my company to investors. I have spoken to so many VCs on the phone. It’s always the same. I refuse to do a business plan projecting how we can scale. It is like an experiment we are running and it is against my personal nature to pitch my plans to investors – just to raise money – as something that will work without fail. VCs don’t understand my perspective and I can’t blame them as they have to justify their investments to their LPs. I cannot change my nature and personality just to raise money.  If anyone is interested in my company I prefer a one on one meeting. But I insist that I will not give a business plan nor I will pitch my company to raise money. The investment has to come because they instinctively trust me and have a somewhat religious belief that I will at least give their money back if not grow it by 10 times. That is the understanding with which our angel investors have invested in us, by the way. One of them is a VC and he thinks personally he has no problem with my style but as a VC he cannot convince his other partners. My yard stick for success is different from the pure professional investors.”

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 Docs now offers 1 GB of free storage and users can purchase more for $0.25/GB. Being in the backup business, we do come across questions on how Google offers raw storage at such a low price point and the same kind of price point is not being offered for online data backup. The reason is that there is a significant difference between raw storage and data backup. What Google charges ($0.25 / GB) is just for the raw storage and there is no intelligence to the storage. Data Backup is lot more than raw storage as there is a backup application which intelligently processes the data and ensures data protection with the help of features like versioning, file retention, customized restore process etc. On top of that a backup application offers a completely automated process with protection for millions of files with sophisticated motoring, reporting and management features to identify problems if any and troubleshoot quickly. So it is actually an apple to orange comparison when you compare Data Protection and Raw Storage.

An analogy to the above situation is a SaaS based CRM service. Ultimately even for the CRM service it is about storing data. But CRM services are never priced based on the raw storage as the value is in the intelligence of the CRM application.

Many say G-Drive, the mother of all storage, will be released soon and will result in the end of all online backup companies. But as I said earlier, data backup differs significantly from raw storage. For online data protection applications raw storage is just one component of the whole solution and the significant value lies in the intelligence, convenience, the ease of use and automation it offers in backing up large number of files along with the monitoring, reporting and management features it offers to identify issues and troubleshoot quickly. Hence we feel that G-Drive will simply be one other storage option for a full data backup service rather than being something that will obsolete the online data backup industry.

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.

It’s here – and will cost less than $350

We obsess a fair bit about user interfaces & usability. This TED video from MIT’s Media Labs just blew our mind. Check it out. I promise you’ll be impressed.

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.

Some time ago, we’d written about David Chappell’s talk on Windows Azure, and why it was different. I’d also mentioned that I’d share the slide deck once I got it from David. Here it is.

(the ppt is cued to slide 27 which is where the fun stuff begins – the comparisons with other platforms. As we said earlier, the ‘neutrality’ with which this was presented was refreshing)

Read on…

The Windows Azure Platform a Perspective Chappell

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.

I got a Google Wave invite!

What’s Google Wave? You’ve either been living under a rock or even worse…you have a life!

Anyway, Google Wave is a new product/service form Google that is currently in “Preview Mode”. Preview mode seems to be the mode before Google goes into a never ending Beta. Google Wave aims/claims/hopes to usher in a new way (wave?) of communicating.

The rationale is simple – if email were to be invented today, what would it look like? Google argues that it wouldn’t resemble anything like what we use now – all of which they say are (they say) incremental improvements over their predecessor emailosauruses – remnants of a jurassic era in computing.

Google Wave is (apparently) for today’s communication needs!

If you’ve got an hour and some minutes to spare, you could join 5.9million other people and check out this video – aptly called the looooooong video. Yes it’s long, but it’s guaranteed to knock your socks off. Trust me.

Now excuse me while I play in my Google Wave sandbox. If I get any invites, I’ll be sure to let you know.

(Shameless plug: if backup were to be invented today, what would it look like? The answer is here)

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.