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.

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!

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!

Yesterday was the hottest day in the Netherlands of 2009 (so far) with 32 degrees celsius. The BackupAgent-team decided to have drinks and dinner on the beach in Scheveningen (at least, with the ones that are not on holiday at the moment).

The sun was hot, the drinks were cold and the food was delicious...

Also we said goodbye to Stephane Breton (after whom we named our meeting room). It was his last day of work at BackupAgent yesterday and he is moving back to Paris next week.

With the opening of our new office last week, we also opened the new meeting room. We wanted to give the room a special name, and we named it after Stephane Breton. Stephane has been working for BackupAgent for over 4 years and is our ‘oldest’ employee. He has designed, developed and maintained a great deal of our software-platform. Unfortunately Stephane is leaving us in 2 months from now, since he would like to return to his home-country: France.

Stephane: adieu et au revoir!

BackupAgent is exhibiting at HostingCon, which is held August 10-12 in Washington D.C. HostingCon is the premier conference and trade show for the hosted services industry. The best and brightest from the industry will be in attendance to learn about the latest news, ideas and technology affecting their businesses. HostingCon is celebrating its Fifth Anniversary, and with a projected attendance of over 2,000 Internet professionals from over 30 countries, the 2009 show promises to be the best yet.

BackupAgent will be exhibiting on booth # 129 and promoting its offering for Service Providers; a world-class online backup offering for SOHO and SMB companies. Multi-tenant, private-label and very scalable…

BackupAgent can provide you with a discount code for the registration fee; a very valuable offer to our clients and partners that are interested in attending the show. Contact us for to obtain the discount code.

We're looking forward to meeting you in Washington D.C.!

We have moved and we are proud!

BackupAgent has grown very fast and therefore we have moved! The new office is situated at an fantastic location with an wide view right at the highway A13 (Rotterdam-The Hague). The interior of the new office has been designed by a renowned design-company that did a fantastic job! In the past 2 months, the office has had a major ‘makeover’, and it turned from a old-fashioned office into a stylish and very modern office where we love to work. Below an impression of the makeover:

Last month we held a BackupAgent partner event which hosted many interesting presentations. We filmed some of the presentations, because we wanted our partners to be able to view these even if they couldn’t make it to that event. Within the next weeks those presentations will become available on our partner portal.

Featured presentations will be:

• Key notes of Edward van der Jagt and Robbert van Geldrop
• SaaS Sales Accelaration 2.0 by David Ednie
• How BackupAgent scales by Ruben van der Zwan, Argeweb

Here you find a trailer of those presentations and this gives you a nice impression of that event:

Last month, while visiting the Microsoft Hosting Summit in Bellevue, WA, I ran into Larissa Primeau. Larissa is a journalist for the website Web Host Industry Review (WHIR) and she was really interested in the BackupAgent proposition. As a result we agreed on making an interview for WHIR tv, their online broadcast providing a unique perspective on the rapidly evolving Web hosting industry. Since then, the interview has been posted on their website, I also have included it below.

Last Wednesday , the Channel Xcellence Awards gala dinner was held at the Kurhaus, Scheveningen. Being one of the nominees, we were invited to join this event. We were nominated for 'Most Innovative Business partner' by people of the reseller channel in the Netherlands.

As it turned out the jury, consisting of experienced entrepreneurs, had elected us as the runner up for the Most Innovative Business partner Award! They stated: “From the start, BackupAgent – as small, international operating software vendor – has been a partner-focused organization, both on product as marketing level. It has a clear vision for the future and is ready for the shift when the market will massively adopt external hosted solutions.”

This award is an enormous recognition for our partner proposition and our way of working together with the channel. I am sure we'll continue improving our partner relations to emphasize and maintain this title.

Lastly, I want to thank everybody for voting for us!

In our R&D department at BackupAgent we use an Agile Software Development approach. Agile software development basically means that you cannot expect everything to go according to plan in the real world: priorities can change, estimates might prove to be wrong, a piece of functionality might turn to be more complex than anticipated, a emergency hotfix has to be provided, an employee is ill…all of these events can and will happen. Plan for uncertainty, expect the unexpected, and deal with it.

Part of any development method is Estimates. When we plan for new functionality we of course want to have estimates first: how long do we expect it will take to design, develop, and test the new functionality? And of course we want the estimates to be good: taking into account all the knowledge and expertise of the team, and be independent of which developer eventually will implement the functionality.

We use an fun and effective method for this called Planning Poker. In Planning Poker the entire team gathers for estimating a bunch of new functions. Each person is provided with a set of cards. Each card in the set represents a possible estimate. We use a scale of 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, etc so for each of these numbers there is a card. This might sound cryptic, but bear with me.


A new function is described, questions are asked, and then all the team members individually think of the effort they think the function will take. Each developer selects a card representing the effort they estimate for the function and when the meeting facilitator calls the cards, they all simultaneously show their selected cards.
Now at this point the estimates will most likely differ considerably. The person with the highest and lowest estimates are invited to explain their estimates. The idea behind this is that this can provide new insights for the others. Maybe someone is an expert on some specific technology and he has good reasons to think that the function is harder to implement than the others might think.

Now a second run is played. Most of the times the estimates are much closer this time. We repeat this until there is consensus.

What do we get out of this? Our estimates are balanced and based on consensus; they take the opinion and expertise into account of everybody involved; they are independent on the developer that will eventually develop the function. And…it’s fun…

We have created landing pages for our international visitors. Our website is not only visible in Dutch and English anymore. But the main aspects and highlights are now visible in


This will serve our international partners and prospects, who want to read information about our company and product in their own language. Enjoy!

The votes have been counted......and BackupAgent is now officially nominated as a finalist of the Most Innovative Business Partner Award (English link) of the Channel Xcellence Awards.
We thank all our channel partners who voted for us. Online backup grows, BackupAgent grows, and this shows that we have the right partner mentality. Obviously we will do our best to win the award. A jury looks closely to the 10 nominated companies, and we will have a personal meeting with them to explain our parter focus and innovative business strategy.
On March 18, the winner will be announced on the Channel Xcellence Gala at the Kurhaus, Scheveningen.

BackupAgent can look back on a fantastic year. Our business model and route to market has proven to be very successful. Online Backup is accepted more and more in the marketplace and BackupAgent has definitely contributed to its growth!

International growth

We have proven once again in 2008 that we can also be successful internationally. BackupAgent has closed numerous large international deals. Currently we are working with new partners in Sweden, Poland, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Ireland and the United States and new distributors in Italy and Belgium. Currently, BackupAgent is active in 18 countries, a number that grows every day!

Strategic partners

BackupAgent has also signed agreements with strategic partners in 2008. For example with Atos Origin, who is approaching the SMB-market with a unique SaaS concept. We have also signed an agreement with Databasement, that offers our solution actively within the enterprise market. Lastly, we are very successful in the medical sector, where we cooperate with Pharmapartners, Farmad and Officinall.

Organization

BackupAgent has strengthened its organization further. On the commercial side, we have appointed several Partner Account Managers that can manage the growth of our partner base. Besides that, we have extended our Operations & Support department. Also our management team has been reinforced on a technical, operational and commercial level. This way we hope to be able to serve you even better in the future.

Awards

BackupAgent’s success has not remained unnoticed. BackupAgent has been nominated for several prices and awards of (IT)-magazines. BackupAgent has for example been nominated for the Deloitte Fast 50 Rising Star and CRN Channel Awards. We have also been selected as one of the largest challengers of The Netherlands in the Sprout Challenger 50 and praised as one of the best Dutch tech start-ups in the FEM Tech 25. We are very proud of this and want to thank everybody for their support and votes.

Plans for 2009

In 2009 the whole BackupAgent team will be eager to support you with selling online backup. Your success is our success and we realize that. We expect that you and your customers will, thanks to a reliable backup with BackupAgent, have a carefree Christmas.
On behalf of the entire BackupAgent-team:

BackupAgent is nominated for Innovative Business Partner Award! It is an important award, because it is a channel award and we value our channel very much.

We would highly appeciate it, if you would vote for us. It's fairly simple: just select BackupAgent on the link below (on the top of the page) and fill in your email address on the bottom of the page.

We hope that with your support, we can win this Award. Please vote now! Thanks for taking your time!

BackupAgent is conquering the Nordics. We have recently closed deals with distributor SmartHost and system integrator Pulsen. Although they have just started, SmartHost is already very successful and has signed up the first resellers that are selling BackupAgent actively to their customers. An example can be found below.




Although my knowledge of the Swedish language is not what it used to be :-), I have to mention that this looks pretty slick. The upcoming Winter of ’08-’09 will be a very cold one in Scandinavia. For our Partner Managers of the Nordic region, who will be spending quite some time visiting local partners, I advise them to take a look at these useful tips...

BackupAgent will be represented this year on both Infosecurity and Storage Expo, on November 12-13 in Jaarbeurs Utrecht, The Netherlands. As vendor of online backup software, BackupAgent will present its products and inform you on all the possibilities of our software. When you are a reseller, VAR, ISP/ASP or IT-administrator of a company, don’t hesitate to visit us. Our solutions are suitable for all business environments. We hope to welcome you on the event with a delicious cup of coffee.

• Infosecurity –Hall 8, Booth E060 (jointly with our distributor TechAccess)
• Storage Expo – Hall 9, Booth C030

If you want to register for free for a visit to the event and our booth, click here.

Since last week we have a new toy in our office. Well, the toy itself is nothing new, but it is new in our office. It’s a football table.
So every now and then, during lunches and at the end of the day, we play Sales vs. Support or Engineering vs. Marketing.
Best thing about the table is that the teams are in BackupAgent colors; blue and orange. This way, we always play the ‘Backups’ vs. the ‘Agents’.
As we are all part of a winning team, some of our team can even be more winning.

When I started this blog, I looked at the wiki about Football tables. There I found something remarkable; football tables already exist since 1922! Another remarkable thing I found was the existence of a football table where you really can play with 11 vs. 11 (11 persons on each side of the table). That would have been a great choice for us, since more people can play at one time. On the other hand I can imagine that one game takes a very long time. And after all, people need to work in the office…..

As support engineer I’m often the piggy in the middle, or “tussen de wal en het schip” as we say in Dutch. At one hand there is the Sales Department, who would like to see our product as if it were Play-Doh and you could mould it into any shape that fits customer needs, whenever they would want to. On the other hand you have our Developers, who seem to speak another language altogether and have a totally different definition of time than the rest of us. It is always a challenge to be the interpreter of these two factions.

I have learned over time that the pressure on Development can be quite fierce, as they are the core of the company and without them there would not be a product. That is why it is important to show your developers that you care about them, despite the ruthless demands, and that sometimes all they need to go on, is a human hug:

This title is directly derived from the dogma that ruled the computer industry in the 80’s:

“Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”

In the 80’s IBM was the safe choice for an engineer, since the alternatives were cheap clones which bared the risk of failure and unsupported hardware. As for online backup, BackupAgent is considered a safe choice for several reasons. Doing business with BackupAgent does not only involve buying our software. We offer a lot more.

Any kind of partner

We help our partners in developing a successful online backup business case. We can do this since we have done so already for various types of partners:

• Hosting companies
• System integrators
• DSL providers
• IT Service & Infrastructure companies
• Independent Software Vendors
• Value-Added Resellers
• Large Enterprises

We’ve seen success and failure amongst our partners and we are more than happy to share our knowledge to new partners that are open for our advice and committed.

The right price

Our pricing strategy is based on the ambitions of our partners. Over the years we have crafted and shaped our pricing models. We know what our partners charge for their services and how this price structure is built up. Our licensing model has evolved around it.

Outstanding support and services

Some of our partners run into complex technical or commercial scenarios. Our support department always helps out. We have some highly skilled and well-trained people in our staff, who know all there is to know about online backup. We’ve done various integration projects where we embedded our services in existing billing and provisioning systems. Also, we know all there is to know on proper storage infrastructures and vendors. We’ve seen over hundreds of large and small datacenters and configurations.

The right product features

Our online backup software is designed to backup business data. Therefore we support some very popular business applications, such as MS Exchange and SQL Server. We combined our software with several software packages and business solutions of specialized vendors.

Nobody ever got fired for buying BackupAgent, since BackupAgent will help the partner in building a successful business case. So if you are struggling with this theme today, give us a call and we help you out.

Last week the BackupAgent team went to Amsterdam for some serious team building. To summarize the day;

• Some great activities on the canals
• High tea (gaining some weight by eating 6 different pies and cones)
• A puzzle tour in the city center
• Having a blast dividing the medals for the winners of the puzzle tour
• Watching the Dutch hockey girls win Gold in Beijing
• Some beer drinking with many, many snacks

A great day. And because a few pictures tell more than a thousand words….see below…

As mentioned in this blog, BackupAgent is nominated by CRN-magazine for the Channel Awards 2008, in the category ‘Outstanding product of the year’!

Again, we would like to thank all our partners, resellers and all other people for nominating us.

From today on, you can vote for BackupAgent, with this link. We hope that with your support, we can win this Award. Thanks for taking your time!

BackupAgent is nominated by CRN-magazine for the Channel Awards 2008. And for the best category we could wish for: ‘Outstanding product of the year’! The winners will be announced on November 26 during an award-show at hotel Huis ter Duin in Noordwijk.

Many parties have nominated us. We all thank them gratefully. I believe truly that is because of the close partnerships we have with our reseller/partner-base. We continuously listen to their feedback and improve our software and services accordingly. Next to that, our nomination is a proof that online backup in general has grown tremendously in the last couple of years and has become more accepted and mature. Especially if you know that the other nominees are established companies like VMWare and Microsoft.

But we are not there yet: of course we also want to win the Award! Therefore we ask everybody to vote for us. The voting process starts on August 15 and we will let you know where you can vote for us.

Thanks for nominating us and thanks in advance for voting for us!

From today, BackupAgent has its own sweets! Some companies give out mints or key-cords, but we have decided to develop our own sweets. So, not just a small box of sweets with our logo on it, but actual blue-orange candy that has been designed around our BackupAgent-lock icon. Have you seen that before? At least I haven’t. And the best thing: they are delicious. A sweet strawberry-banana flavour, which makes the sweets a real must-have. And the ‘even-better-thing’: we give them away for free! To anyone who feels like eating a 'blue-orange lock'. So please contact BackupAgent to arrange a meeting, and we’ll feed you!