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Carbonite CEO: Online Backups Sell
My post, How to standout in a sea of storage startups resulted in a spirited conversation, including some really insightful comments here and else where on the web. Raghu Kulkarni, CEO of Pro Softnet, a Woodland Hills, Calif.-based company said not only he is selling his IDrive and IBackup offerings, he is making a hefty profit. Apparently he isn’t the only one seeing brisk sales of online back-up services.
David Friend, CEO of Carbonite emailed to let us know that his Boston-based company is doing well. “We’ve enjoyed 26 consecutive months of double-digit month-over-month revenue growth,” he wrote in an email. He claimed “hundreds of thousands people paying about $50 every year in subscription fees. Theoretically, at 100,000 subscribers, the company could bring in an estimated $5 million a year.
While he agreed with the premise of the original article — little or no hope for ad supported services — he points out that many online storage services are doing too many things when people are looking for simple solutions. “Pure, simple, set-and-forget online backup is thriving,” he wrote in an email, pointing out that “Online backup is a great subscription business. You pay your money and your worries go away. The user’s problem is clear: “Protect me from disk crashes, theft, fire, viruses.”
Maybe that explains why EMC acquired Mozy for $76 million and Symantec paid $123 million for Swapdrive. Carbonite wouldn’t mind a pay-day like that: three year old company has raised a total of $17.5 million in two rounds of funding from Menlo Ventures, 3i Group and Common Angels.
“I think that when the dust settles in four or five years, the online backup market is going to look a lot like the anti-virus market. Almost every PC is going to ship with online backup built-in,” Carbonite Friend writes. Dell currently sells such a service. In such a scenario, broadband service providers who are looking to pad their ARPU might snap up some of these back-up services and offer them to their customers. Broadband Service Providers have already started to experiment with support and other such value services.
Related stories:
* Options for back up your files (WebWorkerDaily)
Mozy Mac Out of Beta; 50 Free Accounts Available
Online backup site Mozy is giving away 50 free year-long accounts to commemorate the official release of their Mac backup client.
To get yours, send a message to techcrunch@mozy.com that answers the question, “Why do you deserve free backup service for your Mac?” Data-loss horror stories are encouraged. The Mozy team will select the fifty best responses and will email the winners instructions to claim their free accounts.
Mozy is a cloud-based alternative to Apple’s Time Machine, which works very well but doesn’t have the added security of off-site data backup. And at $4.99 a month for unlimited storage, the price is couldn’t be much lower.
We covered Mozy’s Mac version last April when it was introduced as beta. The final version of the software has introduced support for Apple Mail and Leopard, along with a host of technical features like bandwidth throttling and compatibility for programs with resource forks.
In addition to local backup solutions like Time Machine, Mozy faces competition from online storage sites such as Apple’s .Mac, Sugarsync, and recently-released Syncplicity. Carbonite, one of the leaders in this space, works on Windows machines but has yet to release a Mac version.
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Who Will Cache in on Cloud Storage?
As data moves into the cloud, storage companies are taking advantage of virtualization and adding more memory to the data center. Techniques such as storage virtualization can improve the usage of existing storage hardware and make provisioning easier, while adding memory to the data center can make accessing information faster.
Many companies are evaluating their use of memory in the data center as they try to strike a balance between easily accessible cache memory powered by flash and slower-to-access disk memory powered by hard drives. At the same time, they’re trying to make their storage easier to provision and more reliable by looking at some form of virtualization. Both trends will change the dynamic for large storage vendors in the years to come.
As you move along the storage technology continuum, you’re trading price for speed. Getting information stored on tape, which is cheap, can take hours or days while accessing something on flash, which costs a pretty penny, takes microseconds. Plus, solid-state drives using flash can’t possibly store all of the data people are creating. There’s also the question of how reliable it is.
Given this, most companies requiring huge storage arrays rely on expensive machines from the likes of EMC or HP. Or they make their own “storage cloud” using commodity disk drives and a proprietary layer of software. By allowing companies to allocate and provision the storage in a software layer, it virtualizes the storage array. It’s essentially the same model that underpins the storage services offered by Amazon S3 and Nirvanix.
Meanwhile, tier-one storage equipment vendors companies such as EMC, IBM and HP have recognized that cloud storage is the future of computing, and are attempting to ride that wave without cannibalizing their high-margin box business. For example, EMC is offering services for SMBs through its Mozy acquisition. IBM last year purchased XIV, which makes the software that can be used to virtualize storage. Large companies such as NetApp and 3Par are attempting virtualize storage as well.
But once the cloud is in place, there’s still the issue of calling up data and delivering it relatively quickly. For certain applications, such as those requiring instantaneous access to large quantities of data like seismic graphing or historical financial analysis, cloud storage may never replace a spinning drive connected to a sever via Fibre Channel.
But for many applications, including media delivery and most application delivery, tweaking storage for the cloud means adding faster cache memory or optimizing the storage infrastructure by geographic location. Nirvanix, the startup providing hosted storage in competition with Amazon’s S3, touts its multiple storage clusters as a way to deliver faster access to stored content. It’s also looking to provide nodes on the customer premise called “NAS heads” that will basically allow for frequently called up “hot data” to be stored there.
Alternatively, or possibly in conjunction with such a setup, a customer interested in amping up the speed of cloud storage might buy equipment from startups providing different levels of cache to aid in hasty data retrieval. We’ve covered some before, such as Atrato, which actually offers a box of disks attached to a controller that runs software designed to access and configure the hundreds of spinning disks. The result is the reliability of spinning disks with a faster information retrieval speed. Others that rely strictly on intelligently routing needed data to cache included Gear6 and Xiotech Corp.
Storage being served via the cloud is a forgone conclusion. It only remains to be seen if a startup like Nirvanix can grow to compete with the big players in storage or hosted computing, and how the larger storage vendors will walk the line of creating cloud products without jeopardizing their hardware business.
A far more interesting trend to watch will be how the growing amount of stored data is kept and delivered in the fastest amount of time. For proof that storage is relevant check out Facebook’s hardware. A little more than 8% of their servers are devoted to the distributed caching system, memcached. The entire purpose of those servers is to speed delivery of information for the social network. In this age of instant gratification, we may find that cache is king.
[from bushwald] EMC to offer SaaS backup and recovery service
Good News/Bad News For Startup Founder Cliff Shaw
Cliff Shaw, founder of ProtectMyPhotos and DocSyncer, is having an up and down week.
First the bad news. ProtectMyPhotos, which launched in October 2006, is done. They spent $280,000 in seed capital to try to make the idea work, but ultimately they couldn’t compete new backup services like Mozy and Carbonite. Mozy was recently acquired by EMC for $76 million, and Carbonite has raised $21 million in capital.
We’re therefore putting ProtectMyPhotos into the TechCrunch DeadPool.
But Shaw also writes to tell us that his second startup, DocSyncer, is going gangbusters. The product auto-syncs word documents on your hard drive with Google Docs. In the last five days, he says, users have auto-uploaded more than 200,000 new documents to Google Docs via the product, making DocSyncer by far the largest single contributor to Google Docs. The product appears to have legs.
There’s still no guarantee that DocSyncer will make it as a business, but users like the product. That’s a good start, and now Shaw can focus all of his energy on making it work.
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Mozy Acquisition Confirmed
EMC Corporation announced the acquisition of Utah-based startup Mozy this morning, confirming our story of September 23. The price is not being disclosed, but our sources indicate that Mozy was acquired for $76 million.
This was an excellent liquidity event for the Mozy team, which had raised just $1.9 million back in 2005. The company claims 300,000 business and consumer customers for their online backup storage solution.
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The Saturday Reader
- Natalie Portman takes the Microfinance message to MySpace. She is helping raise $200 million for Finca International, a microfinance company, reports the Financial Times.
- People are having weird Mozy experiences. There are issues with the back-up service. For the D.I.Y. crowd, Ian Bell has a primer that can result in backup bliss.
- Itiva, a Palo Alto-based Akamai competitor has raised $7 million. Will that be enough to take on the beast from the east and its legal army?
- An American Idol bubble?
- The Poor/Fat Paradox. Or just watch Super Size Me.
- How US tech firms are different from their European Counterparts.
For Mac users some backup options
Online storage options for Windows XP users are dime a dozen. Many of the popular ones don’t love the MAC as much. However, today Mozy launched the mac version of its product which according to Web Worker Daily is pretty good, and can compete nicely with existing options such as Carbonite and Titanize. Anne has put together a list of many different options to back-up your data. I personally use Bingo Disk offered by Joyent. It has never failed me, and it is better than carrying around a USB drive, which I lose more often than I light up a cigar - a lot. Last time I checked, it had about 40 gigs of my data, and works almost seamlessly with Mac. Joyent also has some Automator actions that make it easier to use. If you want to try out Bingo Disk, there is a special offer for GigaOM readers. You can get 100 GB of disk available via WebDAV for $199/year and if you do, use the code “gigaom” during the check-out process as Promo Code and you get $20 off the first year.
Mozy Goes Mac - First Really Useful Mac Hard Drive Backup Solution
Mozy is in the news again after announcing a huge enterprise deal with General Electric last week. Today they’ve pushed a Mac version of their desktop backup solution for consumers. I’ve been using it for a week, and it’s extremely good.
Previously Mozy and competitor Carbonite were excellent ways of backing up Windows based hard drives. Both are very reasonably priced at about $60/year - Mozy allows 2 GB to be stored for free and charges $5/month for unlimited storage, while Carbonite has a 15 day free trial and then charges $5 per month with discounts for pre-payment. Neither charge for bandwidth.
With both solutions you download and install the software and the service then slowly begins to backup your hard drive based on your settings.
Carbonite still only supports XP (and is a great choice for Windows users). Mozy is the only choice for Mac users and I highly recommend it after my testing. You can make a simple request to back up up the entire hard drive, or get more granular and just back up, say, iTunes and iPhoto.
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Tiny Startup Mozy Nails Multi-Million Dollar GE Storage Contract
Online backup and storage service Mozy has quietly grown to 175,000 customers since launching in April 2006. That’s not bad for the Utah-based company that runs the service, Berkeley Data Systems, which raised just $2 million in venture capital back in 2005. The company went big time today, however, when they announced a multi-million dollar deal with General Electric, which bought MozyPro (the enterprise version of Mozy) for all of its 300,000+ worldwide employees.
MozyPro is similar to the consumer Mozy service, but includes server backups, 24/7 support and admin control for the IT department. The service launched last December and 3,200 businesses are now using. GE is now one of those businesses.
Mozy and MozyPro are administered through a desktop client and automatically backs up data on the PC every two hours. Thirty days worth of versions are retained, and users can go back and restore any of those versions.
Rate card pricing for consumers is free for up to 2GB of storage, and $5/month for unlimited storage. Businesses pay $4/month for each employee, plus $0.50/GB/month of stored data. Bandwidth is free. As a side note, GE certainly didn’t pay rate card rates - a deal this large would have a substantial discount.
The company is backed by Wasatch Partners, Tim Draper and Drew Major. They have 25 employees.
We first mentioned Mozy back in 2006 when we covered the major online storage providers. On the consumer side, Mozy competes with Carbonite and others. At the enterprise level, Iron Mountain and EVault are the entrenched competitors, although Mozy says they have a 10x cost advantage over those services. Google and Microsoft will also have products in this space.
A very large untapped market for online backups are the OEM PC manufacturers, who should be providing a free trial with every PC. Mozy is now positioned nicely to land such a deal. After a grueling due diligence process by GE, the PC guys should be confident that Mozy is as secure as their competitors. And charging 1/10 of what they do is great for the bottom line.
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