Summer is over and the BackupAgent team has been working around the clock to wrap up the summer release. We’re announcing some significant improvements and features based on feedback we collected last year from our business partners. Therefore, October 11th we will host a webinar for all interested in the ins-and-outs of this release.  Here are already some highlights:

BackupAgent has released a service manager for Citrix CloudPortal Services Manager 10.0 (CPSM). CPSM is the successor of EMS Cortex’ control panel, which Citrix acquired last year. As part of this BackupAgent is now Citrix Ready Partner in the Citrix Ready program.

Effectively, the new BackupAgent service manager is a port from the BackupAgent provisioning features of Cortex v9.2 to the new Citrix-branded.

BackupAgent is one of the very few vendors who supports hot backups for MySQL. The other week, we were brainstorming about markets we were not addressing and one discussion revolved around LAMP developers. We figured that this community could benefit a great deal from the fact that we have a Linux agent that can also backup MySQL databases. However, LAMP developers are known to be highly self-sufficient, which enables them to hack their own little backup service around their apps.

Just like more and more service providers, we are convinced that automating provisioning and billing processes is crucial when offering a broad portfolio of services to a growing customer base. Control panels form the solid backbone of a contemporary hosting service provider. Therefore we started early on with creating off the shelf integration modules for common panels. Partners could already enjoy seamless integration with e.g.

BackupAgent will host a series of webinars on March 1st for partners in which we will present our roadmap for 2012. In this webinar we will explain about exiting new features for version 4 as well as our plans for our next major release, BackupAgent version 5.

Recently, we have had several interviews with partners about checking and monitoring backups in BackupAgent. We have improved the experience in version 4 and provided some alternative routes for integrating monitoring activities. Partners have indicated that monitoring can be time-consuming depending on the type of SLA they provide to their customers. Some of them took our advice and implemented alternative ways to logging in to the management console.

After months of fine-tuning we finally released BackupAgent v4.1.5 for general availability so all SPLA partners can now upgrade to this new version. We want to grant all partners the opportunity to refresh their memory about this major release with a special webinar.

Topics covered will be:

Recently we’ve added another Parallels product to our portfolio of standard billing and provisioning products for hosters and service providers to bill and provision BackupAgent online backup services to customers. In the following screenshot you can get an impression of how this works in PBA-S:

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.

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.