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.

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.

Hope these are not perceived as just wishful thinking on my part. My comments are based on our experience supporting more than 1000 partners offering backup services to tens of thousands of SMB customers. Below is my unedited comment I sent to ChannelWeb.

On HP’s decisions to kill its Upline online storage service we are not very surprised by the decision. The reason is that we always believed that backup is not like Skype where you install it and it works. Backups by its very nature require monitoring, management and administration to ensure everything goes smoothly. So any large vendor who gets into online backup services thinking that you just sign up large number of customers and then everything can be put on auto-pilot is completely mistaken. That is the reason we never offered online backup services directly to end customers. Our business model is to partner with MSPs and VARs who already provide IT services to their SMB customers. These local MSPs and VARs, because of their proximity to their customers, are in the best position to offer backup services. Since they act as “Virtual CIOs” to their SMB clients they are in the best position to monitor and manage the backups along with everything related to IT in these SMB organizations.

With regard to consumers who backup to a brand name mega online backup service providers, we do not think that is a very profitable business because consumers view storage as a commodity. They do not appreciate the additional value delivered by good backup software and treat everything as just raw storage. Since backup requires monitoring and management the more consumers you sign up the more support you will have to deal with. This just cannot be sustained as consumers are willing to pay for only raw storage and not for the value the software brings. This is one reason HP would have felt it’s not worth their while to go after consumers nor after SMBs where it just cannot be put on auto-pilot. No wonder AOL shut down their XDrive business a few months ago.

Considering the above I strongly believe Carbonite may be under pressure notwithstanding the twenty plus million venture capital they have raised. With the meager amount they charge their customers for storage it is just not sustainable as the cost of offering good customer support can never be recovered.  Needless to say, in spite of Mozy’s brand recognition and EMC’s backing, Mozy may also struggle to scale their business profitably. It may be relevant to point out the blog post, “May be I am not so impressed with EMC“, which I wrote on EMC’s decision to spin off Mozy (Decho).

I also want to highlight another blog post by my colleague, Lux, some time ago: Carbonite and Mozy’s Achilles Heel.

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.

StoreGrid Cloud AMI Beta is available for both Microsoft Windows Server and CentOS Linux Server. Also, the StoreGrid backup server uses the MySQL 5.0 database. All these are bundled together in the StoreGrid Cloud AMI to facilitate ease of deployment for our partners. Of course, we are working on lot more automation as we try to move into production release before the end of 2008.

Why is StoreGrid Cloud AMI relevant for our partners?

Our primary target market segment is Small and Medium Businesses. Considering the growing complexity of IT infrastructure it is our strong belief that it is not easy for software vendors to directly service SMB customers. Close proximity to the customer is extremely important when you service SMB customers. Hence the local VAR or an MSP is in the best position to provide IT services to a small and medium business customer. This is especially relevant when it comes to data backups and more specifically online backups. As we work with large number of partners servicing different types of small and medium businesses with different sets of requirements, it is an absolute must that any IT product or solution we build should provide the maximum flexibility when it comes to deployment options or other relevant functionality.

Given this context, we have always focused on giving as much choice to our partners as they go about augmenting their business with an online backup service powered by StoreGrid. Specifically, as cloud computing as a framework gains momentum, as an aspiring leader in the online backup category, we recognize the need to provide the choice of deploying StoreGrid in a leading cloud computing infrastructure – and nothing beats Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 for a start.

Moreover, for the last two years we have primarily worked with partners who are willing to host StoreGrid in their own data center and offer online backup services to their customers. Many of our prospective partners had expressed interest in having a solution which they can host in a cloud computing environment like Amazon EC2/S3. With the release of StoreGrid Cloud AMI, we are responding to a long under-served market demand.

With StoreGrid Cloud AMI, any IT solution provider (MSPs, VARs) can now start an online backup service without any capital investment. All they have to do is to get an account in Amazon Web Services, instantiate an instance of StoreGrid Cloud AMI, create and mount the Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume as a backup storage and start offering online backup service to their customers. It is as simple as that. The backup data stored in Amazon EBS is periodically backed up as a snapshot to Amazon S3 for redundancy. On top of this partners who require another level of redundancy can instantiate StoreGrid Cloud AMI as a replication server and replicate the backup data to another Amazon EBS volume. This again can be backed up as a snapshot to Amazon S3.

Our existing partners or partners who prefer to deploy StoreGrid in their own data center can now use Amazon cloud infrastructure as a redundant storage for the backup data in their data center. All they have to do is to deploy StoreGrid Cloud AMI as a Replication Server in Amazon EC2 and configure their internally deployed StoreGrid backup server to replicate the backup data to the StoreGrid replication server running in Amazon EC2.

As I said, choice and flexibility of deployment is what we provide our partners. To summarize, with StoreGrid, our partners now can offer an online backup service in the following ways:

1. StoreGrid backup server and StoreGrid replication server deployed in their own data center with their own local storage.

2. StoreGrid backup server and StoreGrid replication server in Amazon EC2 with Amazon EBS volume as the mounted storage. And for additional redundancy data in the EBS volume is backed up as a snapshot to Amazon S3 storage.

3. StoreGrid backup server deployed in their own data center with local storage and StoreGrid replication server deployed in Amazon EC2 with Amazon EBS volume as the mounted storage for the replication data. Again for additional redundancy data in the EBS volume is backed up as a snapshot to Amazon S3 storage.

4. Another deployment which is also popular amongst some partners is to deploy StoreGrid backup server on-premise in the end customer location so that there is local copy of the backup data for quick restores. And these partners can now deploy StoreGrid Cloud AMI as a replication server and replicate the on-premise backup server to the Amazon EC2 deployed replication server.

You can learn about more technical details on using the StoreGrid Cloud AMI at http://www.vembu.com/storegrid/amazon-ec2-s3-cloud-online-backup.html

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.