As we are looking at current developments within BackupAgent we frequently have discussions about our customers and the total market. Over the years many companies have started offering online backup services and some of them do so using BackupAgent’s software platform. It is hard to guess how big the current market is, because of the diversity of players operating in it.

At the recent Parallels Summit 2010 WHIR TV interviewed my colleague Roland Sars. Together with Nick Lallas of Parallels he explained why the combination Parallels Automation and BackupAgent is so powerful for service providers and hosters. It’s an interesting video covering some company background and the vision on the service provider and hosting market. The video (posted below) is less than 5 minutes long, enjoy!
 

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?

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

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.

As BackupAgent we embrace the concept of SaaS. From the beginning on we offered our BaaS (Backup-as-a-Service) Model, and there is still a strong believe in this way of approaching the market. Furthermore we notice the acceptance and adoption of SaaS large, and growing.

The speed of a hard disk can be quite deceptive. At first, when the drive is clean and there no applications writing data to it at all, it seems to be quite fast. But after a while, when the drives fill up (i.e. more backups are running simultaneously) the whole system performance slowly degrades. It is then quite easy to overlook the storage system as a cause for this.

Here is an example of what happens with the performance, as data fills up the drive:

Last week one of our partners was in urgent need of support since one of his clients was recovering from an apocalyptic disaster. Because of the nature of business it was crystal clear that the customer would go bankrupt if critical data could not be recovered. We had to make sure all data was restored in a consistent state.