Recently I caught my eye on Steve Blank and Eric Ries who have been crafting a compelling model for (software) startups called ‘The Lean Startup’. As I read and watch more and more materials they’ve spawn over the years, I frequently got flashbacks on our early days, when we were starting the BackupAgent company on the Delft University Campus.

Here are some nice videos about the concept:

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2289
http://steveblank.com/2009/11/23/customer-development-past-present-future/

Lean before it was called ‘lean’

Our early BackupAgent practices were in fact complying to the important lessons of Steve and Eric. Here’s why:

• During the early days we talked and talked and talked with a lot of potential customers, channel partners, influencers and friends about our idea. We still do so today. This matches one of their very important philosophies; the facts are outside the building.
• We had a ‘minimum viable product’ which we threw into the market place very soon. We rendered a lot of feedback and attracted serious attention by doing so. It even enabled us to convince investors.
• We pivoted. We pivoted a lot. We didn’t start out by selling a software platform to Internet Service Providers. To prove this, take a look at our very old website and one 6 months later, where we started to reach out to ISPs.

The missing frame of reference

This results in the question if we would be even more effective if we had any notion of Eric’s and Steve’s theories. While we were busy building our company, we frequently had very fundamental discussions on how we performed. We did suffer from some pitfalls, like these:

• We hired and put fate in senior sales execs before we nailed the sales process by ourselves. We expected them to go out and sell, while it didn’t happen. It took off only after we ‘validated our customers’ and crafted a ‘sales roadmap’ combined with marketing efforts.
• We didn’t always pivot out of own vision and some of our features did end up in the product, because one customer or partner insisted on it. Thinking now: we should have showed them the door.

Do customers ask silly questions? Once worked on a service desk, or have read one of the many famous help desk stories, one must admit that this is true! But how is it possible that otherwise bright, thoughtful and intelligent people ask "silly" questions? Peter van Eijk wrote a very interesting article about Computer Human Interaction (Dutch / English (Translated by Google). Investigations to user interfaces are normally focused on visually impaired people, but professor Alan Newell, stated that the same applies for people with limited attention, like in emergency situations. A good interface can then literally mean the difference between life and death. What happens if someone with an IQ of 140 has to perform 10 different tasks? Add (stressed) emotion to the mix and how much cleverness can you expect per task?

One can imagine that the engineer, that is picking up all the pieces after a disaster has a lot on his mind (All data: gone! Database: gone!) and therefore is unable to calmly think through all the required steps to perform. This is not the time of complex dialog screens full of needless fiddling options! The man needs his data back, now!

Keeping this thought in mind enables BackupAgent employees, whether being designers, developers or support engineers, to make on-the-spot decisions: An extra feature is requested: will this make the restore process more complex? New technology is available, will it make the restore process faster and/or more reliable? An error occurs: does it happen during backup, when we have time to figure out why it happens, or during restore, thereby making it very critical? Following these guidelines has made our software naturally and intuitive to use: packed with advanced features, but easy and straightforward in times of distress.

This may be a bit late, but we still like to wish all our partners all the best for 2010! As for BackupAgent, we are looking at an exciting agenda when it comes planned events, first quarter of 2010.

Parallels Summit 2010
Like last year, we’ll be present at the Parallels summit. It is the golden oppertunity to meet with your industry peers and form new alliances to build better Cloud Services based businesses. The summit is held February 22 – 24th in Miami (Florida, USA).

WebhostingDay
WebhostingDay unites the decision makers of the leading web hosting companies from Europe, America and Asia, thus providing an ideal venue for an exchange of experiences as well as networking among equals. Meet us here on March 17 – 19th in Bruehl, Germany.

Microsoft Hosting Summit
We also plan to visit the Microsoft Hosting Summit for the third consecutive time. This is due 28 – 29th of April in Seattle.

Last year we met a lot of new business partners on these events. This year we look forward to meeting up with them again to brainstorm on further growth of the online backup business. Next to that, we do expect to meet new potential partners as well.

Last September we were on the road with our technology partner Parallels. In several EMEA cities we promoted our backup service integration module for the Parallels Automation platform. On the road show in Amsterdam, Roland met the WHIR tv film crew and they were very interested in the this module. See the interview below where Roland explains the benefits of control panel integration, the downsides of tape backup, and our seed-load technology.

Apart from being a marketing man, I am also a quite fanatic webdeveloper. For developing the logic for websites and other online tools I have a big preference for the scripting language PHP. It is fairly easy and fast way to build average functionality. As a PHP developer is soon learned the ease of using MySQL databases to store and retrieve my data since PHP has a lot of standard functions to communicate with MySQL.

What really made my day was when the guys from development told me that they were planning on releasing a backup possibility in the client software for MySQL databases. It was always a great hassle to secure my databases; manually logging into phpMyAdmin, go to the export screen, selecting tables, defining export options, etc. Doing this once is not such a big deal, but doing this on a daily basis makes it really annoying! Moreover, this way of backing up is neither differential nor incremental. Since I already use the BackupAgent client software, this was a real cool and useful addition!



In the meantime, the new client software is released and I performed my first backups of the MySQL databases. And the first results are promising! Of course, I have tried the most important part of the functionality: the restore. All went really smooth.


Thanks partners for this feature request, and thanks development for this successful execution!

I was positively surprised when I heard that we were nominated for the Channel Xcellence Awards for the second time in a row! After a very promising runner-up position last year, we are again nominated for the ‘Innovative Business Partner Award’. Next to that, we are also nominated in a new category ‘Economic Survivor Award’. I guess I don’t have to explain why this is a new category.

A little bit of background information: these awards, organized by ChannelWorld, are from channel businesses, for channel businesses. This means that companies within the channel can select nominees for several award categories. This makes it a real sincere election.

Knowing that we are nominated by the people that we do business with is great. I feel real honoured and at the same time I believe that our partner-focused approach can take credit for this. Both nominations motivate me even more to continue building on an extended partner support program.

Since we are nominated, I want to take it all the way:

I hope to count on your vote!

We've launched a major release of our client software for Windows last month (version 3.13.2.1). The most important new features and functionality are listed below:

• The new major release of the Online Backup Client for Windows officially introduces the support for 64-bit operating systems, including the newly released Windows 2008 R2.
• Logging and error reporting has been greatly improved to make it more informative and understandable for the user.
• Finally, small files cannot only be backed up in a batch, but restored in a batch as well! This will save our customers lots of time and increases the usability of this new Client.

Support for Windows 7 and MS SQL 2008

Currently we are performing internal tests to officially support Windows 7 and MS SQL 2008. The Windows Client has already successfully past the Microsoft certification process, so soon there will be more to announce!

First feedback from our customers

Today the new Windows Client generates alot of positive feedback! This encourages us to introduce a new generation of our software in 2010.

It’s finally coming; the long awaited support for Windows Server 2008 will come. We decided to include support for Windows Server 2008 R2 right away, since it was recently released by Microsoft as the successor of Windows Server 2008.

What took us so long?

To tell you the truth: we rock on Windows Server 2003. Over the years, BackupAgent Provider (our server software) really proved to be highly stable. In fact it was such a success that we decided to be absolutely sure we could build on that reputation regarding Windows Server 2008. Therefore, we turned the new Microsoft platform inside out.

More power out of the same hardware

Many of our hosting partners have become highly enthusiastic about Windows Server 2008. They especially refer to IIS7, which is significantly more efficient then IIS6. Also, the SMB2 protocol is a better network storage protocol then the original SMB protocol on Windows 2003; it allows hosters to drain more power from of their existing hardware. For BackupAgent it is yet another step in maintaining our position as most scalable and high-available solution in the market.

Easy installation

We’ll launch a demonstration movie soon to demonstrate how to install our product on a new Windows Server 2008 instance!

It’s finally there! The long awaited support for MySQL databases. Our customers can backup their MySQL databases with this brand new Online Backup Client.

But there are more benefits; from now on, customers have the ability to run pre and post scripts before and after backups and restores. Furthermore, our developers have added support for unlimited account to this Client.

The last three months we've completely revisited the functionality for logging (certain messages have been revisited to make them more informative and new messages have been added) and our core backup process. The backup process has been improved to execute operations concurrently, where they were executed in a sequence before. As a result, the amount of memory use has decreased for backups of large sets of files, plus such backups run faster!

We hope that these new features, and of course several fixes for issues that were reported by our customers, will accelerate your daily back up tasks!

Support for Snow Leopard
Recently some of our customers asked us if we support the new Mac operating system Snow Leopard with this new Client. Currently, we are running tests to ensure that our Client supports Snow Leopard soon. Please follow our blogs because in a little while there will be an announcement concerning the formal support of Snow Leopard by BackupAgent!

At BackupAgent we find it very important to nurture the relationships we have with our partners. Lately we are noticing that some partners are benefiting from this, because they’ve listened to our advices. They’re obtaining more and more positive press and it mainly concerns the price/quality ratio for online backup services they provide.

Things that matter

• Usability:
  This is by far the most important requirement when it comes to obtaining significant numbers of customers. You must assume your SME customers will be trying multiple tools and if they feel comfortable using the application, they will go with it.

• Total cost of service:
  Our partners’ selling price and margins really matter, because they can beat competitors on price, while your sales staff is highly rewarded. At BackupAgent we specialize in keeping all costs low. This involves hardware investments, datacenter costs, project overhead etc. Our software allows you to be competitive with a minimal investment. Our approach to reach this goal is to advise our partners to be ready using a scalable and high-available environment from the start.

• Provisioning (either directly or through resellers):
  Allowing customers to buy services easily is one of the most critical success factors when it comes to providing online backup services. Offering a similar experience to resellers proofs to be even more valuable.

Things that do not matter

• License costs of the BackupAgent software:
  Whether you buy from us or from one of our competitors, the license costs of the software will be at highest 30% of the total costs of service. This means it is far more valuable to focus on lowering costs of the remaining 70%, in which we specialize.

• Branding features:
  We have partners that rebrand the services and we have partners that decided to go with our brand. We can’t see any difference in success or pickup ratio amongst these partners.

• Data traffic and peak load:
  Our partners all show a data load graph which looks like a normal distribution. Peak loads will not be too high and hit at night.

These shortlists are extracted from our experiences with successful partners. Using our software they provide best bargains for online backup.