If you are in the web hosting industry you probably would have heard ‘cPanel’ very frequently. We had some active developments with the cPanel team and now we have a complete integrated solution with cPanel / WHM for managing domain backup and restore.

So, here we are at the cPanel automation bootcamp to showcase StoreGrid Hosting Provider Edition, designed for Hosting and Cloud Service Providers to deliver full and self-managed backup and recovery services. With extended support for cPanel/WHM integration and effortless bare-metal recoveries with P2V migrations.

We came to Austin yesterday and had a tiring flight from SFO. I woke up early today, got ready for event and took a cab to the Sheraton Hotel to check-in and registrations. Wait a minute! isn’t the event starting only at 3 PM central? yeah!, we realized that after we reached the venue. To our surprise there were people already buzzing on the lobby wearing T-shirts with some technical names on it (just like us). We had some really good conversations with some of the folks attending the bootcamp.

I have my cPanel TV Live session tomorrow Tuesday 11am CST. I plan to walk through StoreGrid Hosting Edition overview and competitive advantage. I’m joined by Srivatsan Venkatesan from Vembu (Vice-President, Product Management).

As we get in to the final stretch of preparation – I’m really hoping to see many of our partners, cPanel users and of course with our competitive brothers and sisters!

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.

Firstly, I want to state upfront that I do not like to beat around the bush to gain some PR advantage. We have no interest in succeeding by hook or crook. We want to succeed by adding true value to our partners and customers and we expect our partners to also want to succeed by adding true value to their customers. I personally hate to make money from anyone who did not gain some value through our product and services. That is one reason I absolutely do not pitch our business to venture capitalists as I do not want to be obliged to investors and do things against my philosophy just to provide returns to them.

Let me first do a reality check on our current business model:

1. 95% of our revenues are generated by our close to 2000 partners. 90% to 95% of these partners are managed service providers who host StoreGrid in their data center infrastructure and offer a managed online backup service to their customers. Between 5% and 10% of our partners would be hosting providers who provide a backup service to their cloud hosting, managed hosting or co-location customers. I want to mention that in our current business model there is no commitment, in terms of meeting some sales targets, we expect from partners – they simply purchase licenses upfront and get a volume discount or purchase licenses as and when they add a customer to their managed backup service. We do not insist on any long term contract or anything. Our partners continue to stay with us because they see value in continuing with us and not because of any contractual obligations.

2. 80% of our partners service customers with less than 100 employees. Most of our partners act as the outsourced IT manager taking care of everything IT for their customers and most of these customers may not even have an internal IT person and fully trust the local MSP for their IT needs. It is also important to mention that we have no visibility into our partners’ customers. We do not even know who these customers are. In the last 4 years of us focusing on this business model, we have never had a situation of a customer of our partner contacting us to purchase our product directly from us. So there is no question of competing against our partners by undercutting them by directly selling to their end customers.

3. Our partners have anything between 10 and 500 customers spread equally across all sizes. 50% of our partners have converted less than 10% of their customers to StoreGrid based managed backup service and 26% say they have converted between 10% and 25% of their customers to StoreGrid based managed backup service. Though we are not exactly sure why our partners have not been able to convert more of their existing customers, I am sure our partners are doing their best to get them converted and it will just be matter of time majority of our partners’ customers are moved to StoreGrid.

4. 92% of our partners say StoreGrid as a product is either excellent or good. We have been adding several new features to the product and would continue to do so and improve the value we offer to our partners and their end customers. Hopefully, as StoreGrid evolves and matures, our partners would be able to convert more of their customers going forward.

5. On the quality of technical support too, we have been rated highly by our partners – the average rating being 4.3/5.0. I want to highlight that this is about the free technical support we provide to our partners as part of their subscription license fee we charge them. We do offer premium technical support with telephone support and guaranteed response times etc. No wonder the number of takers for that is rather small considering our basic free support is one of the best in the industry.

6. It has taken four years for us to get to 2000 partners. We have spent considerable amount of money and resources in acquiring these partners. Our success depends upon the ability of our existing partners to add more and more customers to their StoreGrid based managed backup service and our ability to add thousands of new partners every year.

We as a business have to keep looking for diversification into different market segments and drive growth with the aim for taking a leadership position in this data protection domain. Indeed we like our current business model of serving the small business customers through our dedicated channel partners. We will continue to invest and grow this market going forward. But as StoreGrid evolves, we believe we have a chance to position StoreGrid in the medium sized business segment. Most of our ongoing strategy is based on feedback from our existing partners/customers and also some of our prospective partners and customers. Let me talk about our immediate diversification strategies and why this is not a strategy to compete with our partners or sell directly to their customers.

Why Vembu Home Online Backup Service to Consumers

Consider the fact that we have signed up close to 2000 partners in the last 4 years and that all our active partners put together have converted possibly 30,000 or more business customers to their StoreGrid based managed online backup service. The two well-known current brand names in online backup domain, Mozy and Carbonite started off by targeting consumers and spent quite a bit of money in building a brand amongst consumers. It is a different matter that they may not be really viable, long term businesses trying to treat backup as a commodity for even business customers. But by lieu of building a brand amongst consumers they get lot more attention from the press, the bloggers and even amongst the MSPs than they deserve. That is the reality. We can only build a brand by focusing on the consumer market or by focusing on the large enterprises. It is not easy to build a brand by focusing on the SMB market that too through the channel. Why is a brand important to us? It is important because it will reduce the cost of acquiring a lead for us and it will also help us convert more of our leads into partners as it will give the prospective partners more confidence in partnering with a reasonably well known brand than dealing with what may be perceived as an obscure little company. It is a different matter that we feel we have a very good product backed up by a highly committed technical support. When it comes to signing up large number of customers or partners, a recognizable brand name definitely matters. By providing services to consumers we want to build a brand name in the cloud storage domain.

I see no reason why our MSP partners should feel threatened by our consumer focused initiative. By definition, MSPs focus on business customers who tend to outsource their IT as they see better value in an MSP managing their IT rather than themselves. The data I have provided about our partners establish that very clearly. Of course there are always some businesses which are confused. They may have some IT capability internally and they may look at the commodity storage services available and start comparing them with the MSP provided IT service. Either the MSP has to educate such customers about the value they bring to the table or just let the customer try the commodity service and figure it out for themselves. For the Vembu Partners, even if we do not provide a commodity online backup services to the consumers, these businesses are going to compare the MSP services with the other competitive consumer focused commodity services anyway. The business customer who is confused and does not see the value the local MSP bring to the table is anyway lost and there is no point in MSPs trying to win them over. If someone does not see the value it is better to not win them over as a customer as it will only result in unhappy customers because of mismatched expectations.

Also, our Vembu Home backup service license agreement clearly precludes businesses from using the service. Even those business users signing up as individual consumers would have anyway signed up with a competitor. Vembu, as a business, wants to win the mind share of such business users too. Once we win their mind share, there is a distinct possibility that they realize that commodity online services may not be all that perfect for businesses (as they are for consumers). And they may be more willing to see the value the local MSP bring to the table. When that happens we surely want to provide those businesses as a lead to our MSP partners. The modalities of how that will happen have to be worked out. We need to start somewhere and hopefully it will all work out as we plan.

Of course, there are some MSP partners who claim they also want to go after the consumer market. The same logic as business customers applies here too. If there really is a consumer need which the MSP tries to fulfill and the consumer sees value, it is fine. But if the consumer does not see the value the MSP offers, then she is anyway going to go with a commodity service. Why cannot it be Vembu? Why should Vembu give up serving that consumer and win their mind share if it can help us in some intangible way. That is what we think. Majority of our MSP partners focus on business customers. We do not believe it is possible for the MSPs to easily offer a commodity service to consumers. If they want to do that they have to become SaaS vendors themselves by creating and owning the core IP etc. This is the reality we believe in and we need to follow a strategy based on what we believe in. Commodity consumer offering will always be part of a larger offering as it is impossible to sustain a business by only offering commodity services to consumers. It is always offered with a larger strategic goal in mind. If some MSPs want to also offer commodity services to consumers they cannot do that simply by licensing the IP for the core services from a vendor. They have to own the IP themselves and in that case they are no longer an MSP.

Why Vembu Pro Online Backup Services

Since the time we released our StoreGrid Service Provider Edition for MSPs, we have always had prospective partners express interest in reselling a managed backup service hosted by Vembu rather than hosting it themselves and managing them. As a vendor we initially decided to be a pure software vendor as we did not want to invest in building our own data center and the associated NOC. We have always been quick to offer options to our partners including having the ability to host StoreGrid in “Infrastructure as a Cloud Service” like Amazon Web Services. Now that we have enough experience in working with cloud computing services like Amazon Web Services we believe we now are in a position to host StoreGrid in Amazon Web Services and offer business an online backup service. The Vembu Pro online backup service will be offered exclusively through the channel. That means it is just an extension to our current business model where we license StoreGrid to our MSP partners for them to host and provide a service. Even our existing MSP partners have a choice now. They can offer options to their customers where in the backup is done to their data center or if the customer chooses the backup can be done to the Amazon Cloud. We probably are the first serious vendor focused on the channel providing such a capability. Backing up to the Amazon Cloud, specifically the S3 infrastructure, can be such a compelling selling point to the MSPs. At least that is what we are hoping for.

As I said, Vembu Pro will be offered exclusively through the channel. And we are also putting together an SMB lead generation program through which we want to provide SMBs interested in backing up to the Amazon Web Services as leads to our partners. These are in early stages but it is just a matter of time before all these things come together. And believe me when I say Vembu Home for consumers is an important component of this whole strategy and it is not meant to compete with our partners by undercutting them.

What about StoreGrid Professional Edition – the on-premise or branch office backup solution?

Until now we have never had to face a question about our StoreGrid Professional Edition. It has been there even before the release of our Service Provider Edition. So far, we never actively marketed it. But we do get sales from businesses that is looking for a self managed on-premise backup solution or other larger businesses for consolidating their branch office backups to a centralized data center. Though there are direct sales from businesses we also have about 50 resellers actively reselling the StoreGrid Professional Edition. We have a Channel program for that too and a few of our MSP partners also resell StoreGrid Professional Edition apart from offering an online backups service to their customers. We never really paid much attention to selling the StoreGrid Professional Edition and whatever has been happening is on its own. We are evolving StoreGrid Professional Edition recently and we believe it is just a matter of time before we are in a position to take on the likes of Symantec Backup Exec – by offering compelling features at 1/5th or 1/10th the price. We will then actively seek resellers to push StoreGrid Professional Edition to customers who want to stick to on-premise backups. As I said we do have a channel program already in place which can be fine tuned and evolved based on market requirements. Here again our main strategy is to involve the channel wherever it makes sense. But there are these occasional online sales which happen across the world on its own. If ever such a sale happens because of some effort from our channel partner we will surely compensate them for that. And this is the type of guarantee I can provide the channel as of now. We will also be seriously looking at some kind of customer registration program wherein a channel partner can register a customer with us and we then make sure any direct communication from the customer is always routed through the channel partner. We do have such a program in a small scale in India with a reseller.

I sincerely hope this long post is treated as an honest effort from our side to dispel any doubts in the minds of our partners about our ongoing strategy. I am sure there are some of our partners who are not going to be entirely happy. To them I want to say that we are as open and transparent as it can get. We say things as they are however uncomfortable the facts are. End of the day, our long term success can only be guaranteed only if we can continuously provide value to the end customers. Any strategy which revolves around an assumption of customer ignorance cannot last long and as a company we are uncomfortable in forging any strategy based on an assumption of customer ignorance.

I am open to honest feedback and suggestions based on market reality where the internet and the social media have turned all the existing business models upside down.

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.

While the U.S. and the world economies are still trying to come out of the economic crisis, companies have been trimming their work force. The luckier employees who still have their jobs intact now spend much longer hours at work, making up for the reduced work force. It has not been easy for the business owners either. A survey conducted by Grant Thornton International (http://www.gti.org/Press-room/stress2010.asp ) found that 76% of the business owners have reported increased stress levels over the last year, majority of them citing economic climate and increased work load as the reason for it.

In such a global environment, it is only natural that the companies now look at their investments and try to adopt newer ways to reduce their excesses, introduce more efficient processes and improve their ROI. Among the frenzy of changes, one of the knee jerk reactions for businesses would be to scale down their services/expenses towards their smaller customers while focusing primarily on their larger partners. Jennifer Walzer ratifies this in http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/11/can-we-afford-to-continue-serving-small-clients/

But is it really that simple? Can one just sift away the minnows? Consider also this:

Smaller companies are nimble. They adapt to changes much better. They spend their resources carefully and efficiently. Small companies can therefore weather the bad economy better than some of the larger ones. This means they probably would continue to remain as your customer even when economy conditions are worse.

Peter Bergman in his blog: http://blogs.hbr.org/bregman/2009/03/why-small-companies-will-win-i.html makes a very interesting point. According to him one important factor that makes it possible for smaller companies to thrive better, especially when economy is bad, is trust. According to him, customers prefer smaller companies because it is  easier to trust them. This factor could actually fetch the smaller companies new opportunities from their large competitors. This might be an important factor and you could expect your smaller customers to actually grow. And you grow when they grow.

In tough economic conditions, you cut marketing expenses and look at organic growth for your business. You might just not have enough resources to aggressively pursue larger customers. But it might not be a bad idea at all to reach out to smaller customers, sign them up one at a time and earn their trust. These small customers can then be the catalyst to spur your organic growth further within their community without you have to significantly increase your marketing expenses.

Therefore, take another look at your smaller customers. Runs some numbers and see if they really are consuming 70% of your resources while fetching only 30% of your revenues. You may be surprised to discover the opposite. Not to sound cliché, but you could admire the mammoths but please also give some credit to the ants – after all they are still around with us.

The above post was written by Sathish Subramanian 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.

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Here are the highlights of the new features which are available with the latest update.

I. Network Mapped Drives support:

One of the most requested features since our initial release was the support for mapped drives. With this feature, the users will be able to

1. Backup from a network mapped drive to the Local HDDs or the Cloud Server
2. Store local backups to a network mapped drive

This feature is ideally used by users who have multiple computers/devices with critical data to backup but which have an operating system not yet supported by Vembu Home. Using a simple network mapping to the share or drive of the other systems, users will be able to backup those computers. The users can also backup to and from your Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices.

II. Global Configuration of backup encryption password & CPU Usage:

In our initial release, users had to configure encryption password and CPU usage for each backup set. We have now moved the password and CPU usage configurations under the options tab along with Backup Window configuration. Users will now be able to store a common global encryption password for all their backups. The users can also change the CPU usage dynamically for all the backups at one place.

III. ‘Do not Backup’ Window Settings configured by default:

Now, ‘Do not backup’ window settings are configured by default between 8 AM to 6 PM. Users don’t have to now worry about backups hogging the system resources during those hours. Backups will automatically stop during the ‘Do not backup’ window hours, and will resume after the window. This default configuration has been done only on fresh Vembu Home installations. For the existing installations, you can go to the Options Tab and manually configure them.

IV. Test Connectivity with the Amazon Cloud Server:

With this feature you can check the connectivity with the Amazon Cloud Server.

V. Advanced Graphical Backup Report added:

We have added a more intuitive backup report for

1. Files configured for backup, protected files & skipped files
2. Storage quota in Amazon Cloud, storage used by backup & storage used by the client.

VI. One-Click Configuration of Pre-Configured Backups:

A more intuitive representation for the pre-configured backups available with Vembu Home Console is now provided. This provides one-click configuration of your favorite backups such as My Documents, Outlook, Registry & System State, Browser Settings etc.

VII. Support for Automatic Software Updates:

Now, any future software updates will be automatically downloaded and installed without any manual efforts from the user.

One of the major under-the-hood features included in this update is the addition of an embedded local web service to the Vembu Home Agent instead of the more bulky Apache-PHP Web Service, making the client much more light weight.

The update also includes several other under-the-hood enhancements which improve the overall performance of the Vembu Home Agent.

The above post was written by Jay 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.

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.

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.

Why many SMBs are reluctant to Cloud?

“Cloud Computing” – a buzz word that’s on the peak of Hype Cycle for quite some time now is still a ‘jargon’ to many SMBs and Mid Market Companies. It was interesting to see the results of the ‘cloud hosting awareness survey’ conducted by RackSpace that more than two thirds of the SMBs in US are not familiar with the term “Cloud Hosting” – Wow!

Now, two questions immediately arise in our mind. Is that the Small Businesses failed to grasp the cloud computing technology or the Cloud hosting providers done a horrendous job in marketing to that segment? I can understand why cloud hosting providers are more catered towards the ‘enterprise segment’ expecting some big deals ($$$) instead of focusing on mom and pop services which are typical of SMBs.

Now that even if the cloud hosting providers turned their flash light on SMBs and started to focus on this segment, they are faced with two big questions (barriers) that needs a fix.

1) Security and privacy concerns
2) Benefit over existing hosting service

A recent Forrester survey reveals that 51% of SMB survey respondents cited security and privacy concerns as their top reason for not adopting cloud computing yet. Small Businesses need a TRUE value proposition on why they need to move their data out of their premises and the real business value they derive out of it. These are some prime reasons on why many SMBs are still reluctant to cloud.

Why SMBs need the cloud?

BANT (Budget, Authority, Need and Time frame) is one(four) good reason on why Small Businesses need the cloud – Sounds like a typical sales pitch?

Budget – The cost of running and managing an in-house data center is increasing exponentially year by year and more than the hardware cost, it’s the support & management cost and business app cost etc… that are the real pain points. On top of it, increasing cost for the maintenance required for the datacenter, electrical power supplies, cooling, bandwidth etc… are some prime factors on why SMBs need the cloud.

Authority – When small businesses require a business app, it has to go through lots of stages especially when maintained in-house. Right from staging, development, testing, production and fail over environment, the in-house IT department will be working on lots of other items as well in order to bring up the business app. Now if there should be a technical problem with the storage devices or servers, SMBs typically don’t have the situation under control and have to rely on the hardware vendor’s technical support.

Need – SMBs usually do not have remote data centers for managing their offsite data backup requirements. Data Backup is more than a need – a mandate for running successful businesses. Businesses without proactive backup and recovery policies are likely to be OUT OF BUSINESS within 2 years of a major disaster. Replication to a cloud platform is an effective data backup and recovery strategy and helps Small Businesses to withstand a data disaster.

Timeframe – Small businesses don’t have to go through a typical two week purchase order process and additional two weeks of configuration, staging, testing etc… in order for a Business Application to be available for production use. With Cloud Computing, they can get up and running in few days and this quick process will have a profitable impact on the business.


Small Businesses have always more reasons to shift their data out of their premises and move it to the cloud. But they are reluctant and held up and what they need is the right message that “Your Data is Safe and Your Business is Protected” to get them up and running on the cloud.

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.

As a Service Provider it becomes necessary to understand the terms that your customer uses and effectively communicate back and Market using the same ‘terms’.  ‘Google Insights’ has the innate ability to analyze the search patterns on a Geographic scale over a period of time and precisely report back with the ‘Search Terms’ that people tend to use. The Graph below shows the usage of frequently used ‘Backup Terms’ and its interest level over a period of time.

As you can see from the Graph, number of people searching for ‘Online Backup’ has grown tremendously since 2004 and number of people using the term ‘Remote Backup’ and ‘Data Backup’ came down gradually.  It’s not over! This does not mean that everyone has to go with the term ‘Online Backup’ for marketing their service. This report just means that the global search volume for the term ‘Online Backup’ increased since 2004. However, if you are confining this result to a city or country, you will be surprised to see ‘different results’.

The above report says that people from New Zealand, South Africa, United Kingdom, Hong Kong etc prefer using the term ‘Data Backup’ rather than ‘Online Backup’ and people from UK are more comfortable with the term ‘Remote Backup’ than ‘Online Backup’.

Likewise, the way people name a service differs from region to region and with the help of Google Insights you can understand the search behavior of your customers and tune your website accordingly to attract more customers using Organic Search Results.

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.

“Thought Leadership centers on earning trust and credibility. Thought leaders are noticed by offering something different – information, insights and ideas, for instance.”

For IT service Providers who are wondering what this TLM can do for them, here is the answer. According to the recent press release by Gartner , Thought Leadership Marketing can be a powerful tool for IT service Providers.

Also Gartner defines TLM as giving of information or advice for free or at nominal charge that a client will value so as to create awareness of the company’s product and stimulate demand for it in the market. Below are some of the key benefits of Thought Leadership Marketing.

1) TLM shortens the sales cycle
2) Change the pattern and terms of how people buy from you.
3) Diminish price resistance
4) Prospects experience your value before buying
5) Buyers invested in your service before purchasing
6) Growth in Social Media Placements
7) Assistance in SEO and SEM activities

TLM is one good piece of advice or information that can expressed via blogging, public speaking, writing articles and through various social media activities. According to Mark Peshoff, Senior director of Cisco, “Once Thought Leadership is established, the rest of the industry, the media, academia, government policy makers and the broader business community turn to that company for ideas and insights into where things are going”.  There are various programs employed for implementing TLM. However Gartner Analysts say that the company’s brand and positioning must form the basis for the development of TLM strategy.

Below are the Five Keys to successful TLM as per marketingsavant.com in the IT Service Provider Industry.

1) Be Generous with your knowledge – Share information beyond marketing
2) Be consistent in delivering information – Calendar your activities – daily, weekly etc.
3) Always deliver value to your clients – Listen, think, revise and teach
4) Take your strong positions in the market
5) Track your results in Months & Years.

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.

“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.

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.