BackupAgent is looking at an exciting agenda when it comes planned events, second half of 2010:

Date	Event	Place
June 24th, 2010	Business Matters LIVE	Luton, Bedfordshire, UK
July 11-15, 2010	Microsoft WPC 2010	Washington D.C, United States
July 19-21, 2010	HostingCon	Austin, TX, United States
September 24-26, 2010	Parallels APAC Summit 2010	Singapore
October 12-28, 2010	Parallels EMEA Partner Forum	Multiple
November 24, 2010	SaaS4Channel	Lelystad, Netherlands

We are looking forward to meeting you on one of these events and you can always schedule a meeting with us, by contacting us.

We are currently working on a next major release of BackupAgent software, version 4.0. This release will contain important functional changes and improvements. Here are some highlights:

• Data will be stored based on retention policies, instead of versions. Our server software will perform maintenance and purge old data based on these policy settings.
• Management Console dashboard will provide more and faster insight to backups of customers.
• Useless folders (e.g. ‘Temporary Internet Files’) will be filtered by default, preventing service providers from storing large amounts of data that do not hold any significant value.
• Advanced logging to Windows Event Viewer. This allows resellers to integrate their existing monitoring systems with BackupAgent. An example of this integration will be introduced by Kaseya.

We expect to have a release candidate of this version ready in July. We are looking for partners who which to volunteer to test a ‘Community Technology Preview’ of the software at that time. Here’s what we expect from volunteers:

• Test our software and stability and report bugs
• Provide feedback on new features and improvements
• Provide feedback on backwards compatibility

We plan to support a scenario where v3 online backup clients can connect to v4 servers. We will not support any scenarios where v4 online backup clients can connect to v3 servers.

BackupAgent Partners who wish to volunteer for our CTP program can contact their partner account managers. We will select partners who we consider to be eligible out of the list of volunteers. Please understand that participating in this program only serves our mutual goal to improve the final product. No other rights or obligations can be derived from receiving an early release of our software. The CTP program might be subject to a separate NDA.

In this blog post I want to make a strong case for agile development methodology when working with a technology partner on a joint product. Last quarter I worked closely with the development team for Parallels Automation to accomplish integration of BackupAgent in POA. I had the pleasure to visit their development center in Moscow, which I enjoyed really well. Aside from the courtesy and hospitality I received, the project was a clear case for agile development practices. This particularly applied to pair programming, which is probably one of the most controversial parts of agile and extreme programming.

Pair programming

During my five day visit I was paired with a developer from Parallels. We worked together as a team. The developer would write code in PHP, while I would nail down impediments on-the-fly or craft better specs when needed. Ironically, I don’t even know PHP very well, but I was still able to help him produce code effectively. My main goal was to keep his fingers tapping on the keyboard.

Coding is only a small part of the project

The nice aspect of this project is that the work fitted nicely into a single sprint. It might even have been one user story sticking as a post-it note on the internal Kanban board of the team I worked with. Also, the team members had detailed specifications, which were cross-checked with our mutual customers. Looking back at the project we spent most time on specifications and testing. During my 5 day visit 95% of the code was produced, but we deployed the solution to the first customer at least one month later (in March) due to all required testing and preparation for deployment. Most of the work was executed by the Parallels engineers, so I do not have a clear-cut insight on time spent.

The project and visit inspired me and made me realize how important it is to know the productivity and effectiveness of your coding process. It also demonstrated that effective coding depends on a lot more than putting a smart developer on the job.

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. Very often, online backup is a part of a wider cloud or SaaS offering.

Online backup and cloud computing

If you are at the forefront of IT and software you might already consume some of your services in the cloud. In that case online backup might make less sense. This triggers the question whether there is an end to the online backup product life cycle. Fortunately for us, there is a far larger group of companies that still have not even heard of cloud computing. Also, the most popular current paradigm is that of mixing on-premise software with cloud computing to benefit from the ‘best of both worlds’.

Positioning of online backup

Since the majority of companies and users still have to adopt cloud computing, there is a large chance that they will start doing this by consuming the most comprehensible services. I spoke with a local glass house farmer the other week and gave him a glance at my life. I also asked him about software he is currently using and we talked about potentially bringing that in the cloud. This was clearly a bridge too far for him, although the guy is my age and does have an active Facebook account. When I proposed simply to backup his administration over the internet, he was far more interested, but still brought up the ‘trust’ argument.

Crossing the chasm

The point is that it is these people who will feed growth to cloud computing in the future. On the other end maybe a small portion of early adopters will no longer require online backup, because they have moved all their IT needs into the cloud. One can only wonder how fast or slow online backup users will move in and out of the product lifecycle. It looks like a classic example of ‘a chasm’ in a new market.

Once this chasm is crossed the next question will be how long it will take for the online backup market to mature. My estimation is that this will take at least another 5 to 10 years. This is because the masses are very slow in their adoption of something new. It will take at least 1 year for them to realize, consider, overcome the objections and purchase a service like online backup. At that time they only scratched the surface of cloud computing and it will take a lot of effort to move them once again. If you add that to the fact that most of our early customers still have to ‘move on’ to pure cloud computing eliminating the need for online backup, we can safely say that this service is here to stay and grow for the next decade.

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!

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!