I want to share a quick story on how Vembu re-invented and set itself for aggressive growth by adopting disruptive innovation strategies.
Let me rewind a little bit back in time. Back in 2005, we made our first sale to an MSP who used our simple and flexible backup product, StoreGrid, to provide an offsite backup service to a few customers. Our first few MSP customers liked our backup technology and asked us to design a solution which they could use to offer a backup service from their datacenter. We did re-design our product to meet their requirements and launched our ‘Service Provider Edition’ product. It was an instant hit amongst MSPs and soon thousand’s of MSPs around the world partnered with us to create a new business line for themselves by offering a file & application backup service to their business customers. Ever since, Vembu has been in the business forefront of cloud based off site backup & recovery. We have established ourselves as a well recognized brand in serving small business customers through our 4000 plus Managed Service Providers across the world. We also created a completely bootstrapped and profitable business model without any significant investment in marketing.
Our typical MSP customer services about 30 business clients and we saw MSP’s backup requirement as a collective one and created a backup solution that functions across multiple businesses with the need to support heterogeneous operating systems and applications. But we were still mainly playing in the file backup and application backup space when our MSP customers used our product to offer offsite backup service. Initially when the public cloud services were going mainstream, many MSPs perceived the cloud as a threat to their business. But smart MSPs began to embrace these public cloud platforms and wanted us to build technologies that they can leverage on top of it. On the other hand, virtualization was also taking off big time during the past 5 years and there has been a paradigm shift in the way data protection is being done in the medium enterprise and small business segment. In order to stay competitive and relevant, Vembu then recognized the need to make a foray into the new product categories like Image backup for physical and virtual environments (VMware and Hyper-V)
As a software manufacturer we felt the importance of understanding the market requirement of our actual consumers who are businesses and IT administrators in light of these new technologies like cloud and virtualization. In order to understand that, we had to stop treating MSPs as our customers but rather treat them as our channel to reach out to our actual customers. This was a big change in our business model in terms of directly working with the end business customers rather than with just the MSPs as our customer. We made a bold and ambitious move towards this change since we strongly believed in our technology and also in what we wanted to achieve.
We had to go back to the design board, start putting the pieces together and then adjust our priorities based on the new market segment. Being a VMware Elite Technology Partner and Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, we tapped into the resources from these vendors and made two groundbreaking new product releases Vembu BDR & Vembu OnlineBackup to meet the on-premise and cloud backup needs of businesses. In the last nine months we have been aggressive in launching and positioning our new Vembu BDR and Vembu OnlineBackup product directly to small & mid-sized businesses.
After talking to the business stakeholders about our new products designed for backing up VMware, Hyper-V and Physical Servers, we found that there is a huge problem in the way IT administrators are currently handling backups in any organization. Due to advent of virtualization, IT consumption is hugely diversified. On an average, we found that a business uses 3 to 4 backup softwares to provide for backup coverage across all of their systems. This is a huge pain both in-terms of cost and also to monitor and manage the backups across these different vendors.
Coming from the the MSP world of working across multiple environments, we found that our product Vembu BDR can address this challenge experienced by these businesses. The idea of having one backup product that functions across different environments and applications (both physical and virtual) became an instant attraction for IT administrators in small and medium sized businesses. We started getting lots of inquiries and leads and the moment that we have been exactly waiting for seemed to have arrived after a long time.
Let me explain Vembu BDR to you. Imagine a backup product that works across VMware, Hyper-V and Physical Servers and performs both Image backup and File Backups with support for granular restores. And offering the ability to perform instant boot, mount and cloud disaster recovery. Throw in over 90% savings in software license cost. That’s what Vembu BDR is all about.
Vembu BDR is the most cost effective solution for protecting both physical and virtual environments (VMware, Hyper-V, Xen etc.). We also have the best in class technology in terms of how the backup images and its incremental are stored on our VembuHive File System. The granular restore capabilities we offer directly from the incrementally stored backup images is based on a unique and powerful concept that is supportive of innumerable backup use cases. It provides such incredible flexibility in handling the customer scenarios that it stands unmatched and unrivaled by any of our competitor products.
I believe we have effectively breached that threshold of acceptance by outclassing the competition with our upgraded feature sets and by overwhelming their price points with our low cost offering. Today, the difference lies in the numerous breakthroughs that we have instilled in our product like our patent pending VembuHive technology with versatile Disk imaging and Virtualization backup capabilities. We have already supplanted other vendor products at hundreds of existing partner sites and many more customers are now eagerly choosing to migrate over to our solution for their physical and virtual data protection requirements.
In the last six months we have been overwhelmed by the massive interest from the SMB IT-Administrators. We have sensed this excitement from the various tradeshows that we have participated in such as VMware user conferences as well as the marketing ad campaigns that have been garnering exposure and pouring in leads from all quarters. We are also a silver sponsor for the upcoming Microsoft Ignite conference happening in Chicago, Illinois and the VMworld conference in San Francisco, California
Most have acknowledged that there is no product in the market, at the price point we offer, which can do everything from traditional file backups to physical server image backups to VMware and Hyper-V backups – All in one universal solution which is easy to maintain and manage. Interestingly many of our MSP partners, who were initially concerned about their role in Vembu’s change in direction, were quick to recognize the shift that is happening in the market. In the last three months many of our MSP partners have signed up to our new VAR partner program so that they can also reinvent their business model to stay relevant in this new market reality.
It is also true that above all other reasons, our savvy partners and customers have chosen us also due to our long established presence in the data protection market for more than a decade when we built the foundation and brand reputation of our business by earning the trust and recognition of an entire ecosystem of service providers and resellers. We have a proven track record of servicing our customers with a product line that works good at a price line that is most affordable and with a support line that is customer centric and fanatical to say the least.
In fact, we have a slew of “pains that come with the gains” to deal with that which often accompanies such unprecedented growth. Our sales and support pipeline are clogged with humungous requests that we are striving to service earnestly with quality and responsiveness. Rest assured, we are instituting sturdy plans in place for swiftly scaling our internal processes and talent acquisition in order to meet the burgeoning demands of our customer facing entities.
With all these developments combined with the continued dedicated efforts of a top notch technical team, I am very confident that Vembu will soon establish itself as the industry’s comprehensive, cost effective and compelling alternative for the data protection needs of all small and medium sized business customers.
