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.

We’re busy at BackupAgent, very busy. Therefore our blog isn’t updated that much, as you might have noticed. However many things have been going on, a short summary:

• We are sponsoring a SaaS-event in 2 weeks
• We brought a UK partner live
• We launched our partner portal
• We released our latest software version 3.13.2.1 (an blog on the new features will follow)
• Our software has been successfully integrated with 2 control panels (ExtendASP and EMS-Cortex)
• We signed up large new partners in Switzerland, USA, Canada and Turkey
• We have updated our website

Regarding the latest item: the content had structure has been updated. BackupAgent focuses on Resellers and Service Providers, and we have updated the content of these pages. We’ve updated the list with the most important features of our software and written in detail regarding our scalability. Last but not least: our brand-new partner program is adopted on the website.

We hope to serve our (potential) customers better with the updated content, and obviously your can send us your comments.

And…we hope to blog a bit more in the time to come!