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.

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.

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!

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.

Two months ago, we announced our new partner program. Together with this program we launched our Partner Portal. After two months statistics show that our partners make good use of this offering; a lot of marketing material and technical whitepapers were downloaded! Apart from up front research, it is always hard to determine if an idea will work in practice, so the first results are really great!


The original idea was simple: to make a central location for all documentation to ease the process of supplying information to partners. This way we can help them gain more knowledge of the BackupAgent product and the ways to offer it to the market. Technical information helps in understanding the usage and possibilities of BackupAgent, this way a partner is more able to implement and support the product that he is selling. Next to that we offer marketing material which a partner can use to promote its online backup service more easily.

Our goal was to offer this in a clear and well structured user environment. I hope we have accomplished this goal with the current Partner Portal. I’m very curious about your opinions and idea’s for improvements. Please mail us your feedback. If you don’t have an account yet, you can get one from our support desk.

For the second year in a row, BackupAgent is nominated by CRN-magazine for the Channel Awards 2008. And again in the – for us most meaningful – category ‘Outstanding product of the year’ (auto translated mirror). We are truly grateful for the support we’ve got from all parties nominating us and we wish to thank them for it.

I think this is the award for us for continuously trying to improve the partner-relation we have with our customers; on both technical and commercial level. This cooperative partnership has lead to better software, better commercial support and successful partners. Last year we had to be content with the runner up position behind VMWare, hopefully we can gain the highest position this year (something I find fairly conceivable, considering the improvements we’ve made since last year.)

The CRN Channel Awards show will take place on November 12th at the ‘Wintertuin’ (winter garden conservatory) of NH Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky in Amsterdam.

To achieve the Outstanding product award, we have to count on your support. Therefore we ask everybody to vote for us. The voting process has already started, so please visit the voting page (auto translated mirror) and give us your vote!

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

In the beginning of this year we announced our attendance at the Parallels Summit 2009 that was held last February in Las Vegas. Due to the success of this summit and our partnership with Parallels, we will join Parallels in their first EMEA Partner Roadshow as a sponsor and attendee. This European Roadshow is meant to provide Parallels Partners with education, business opportunities and valuable connections to software partners such as BackupAgent. Parallels will help partners align their business with the Parallels product line-up like BackupAgent’s online backup solution and create specific sales plans focused on boosting revenue.

The 2009 Parallels Partner Roadshow will be take place in the following cities:

• Stockholm, Sweden - September 1
• Amsterdam, The Netherlands - September 3
• Warsaw, Poland - September 7
• Cologne, Germany - September 10
• Paris, France - September 14
• Madrid, Spain - September 17
• London, England - September 21

BackupAgent has a speaking slot in every city and will present its online backup proposition for Service Providers with an attractive special offer. I think Parallels offer of in-depth information and demonstrations on cloud computing best practices - such as SaaS and automation – is a goldmine for every Service Provider. So don’t hesitate to register and to come visit us at the EMEA Partner Roadshow!

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 Wednesday we gathered with our partners to update them on developments of BackupAgent. It was a cheerful event in which partners collaborated to sharpen their commercial and technical proposition for online backup services. This event is part of BackupAgent’s commitment to support partners as much as possible. Based on the positive feedback of partners we plan to organize similar events in the near future.


Executives from various countries came together in Zoetermeer to listen to our key-note speakers. Our recently appointed CEO, Edward van der Jagt, made his very first public attendance towards partners. His presentation was well received and backed by an inspiring session of David Ednie on SaaS sales acceleration 2.0.


In the afternoon the group split up for technical and commercial break-out sessions. Important highlight was our introduction of the BackupAgent partner program. This program is the embodiment of our international channel development initiatives.


Presentations and key-notes of this event will become available soon on our website. We’ll keep you posted.

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!

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!

On February 10th we organized a training session for resellers of SmartHost. The training was a result of the first months of their partner recruitment. About 40 people attended the training. The training was held at the auditorium of the new SmartHost offices @ Bergshamra, Stockholm.


During this partner event we also premiered the new instruction videos, which we will publish anytime soon. These movies are very helpful and concisely explain how our software works, also for more complex backup and restore tasks, like MS Exchange and SQL Server backups.


I would like to thank all SmartHost’s partners for attending the training and would like to encourage them to bring in practice what they’ve learned. All training materials will become available through the SmartHost partner portal.

This week NetPage, a company in The Gambia, has purchased a software license for BackupAgent. NetPage holds their offices in Banjul, the capital of The Gambia. The Gambia is one of the smallest nations on the African continent and is geographically formed around Gambia River. It is almost completely encapsulated by Senegal, except for the shore on the west coast of Africa:


We are very proud to welcome The Gambia on our growing list of countries we are serving. It seems that NetPage is one of driving forces behind further broadband penetration and this paves the market for online backup services.

Last month one of our Backup Service Distributors, Argeweb, took their new online backup storage platform into production. This platform can scale up to 2 Petabytes (PB). For Argeweb online backup services will be one of their strategic products for growth.

With Argeweb as one of our active partners, BackupAgent has the opportunity to establish a close business relationship and this allows us to learn a lot from each other. Our offices are merely 25 kilometers away, so a visit to get in touch and in sync is just as easy as a phone call or an e-mail. Because of this Argeweb was able to take great advantage of our growing expertise of ideal storage configurations for online backup services. Also, we highly appreciate that we’ve been able to convince Argeweb to invest in future growth in the shape of a highly scalable and reliable storage platform. 

One of the biggest advantages is that Argeweb’s main engineer expects to get more sleep, since their new storage platform comes with a hands-off SLA. If a disk goes flakey he will be notified per SMS that one the engineers of the service company will enter the datacenter to replace it.

This week we launched our all-new, highly sophisticated and flashy video for the promotion of the BackupAgent Online Backup Service and its Client. Our Partners can rebrand the video and use it to promote their own online backup service. Logo, colors and contact details can be modified to reach optimal rebranding. Please enjoy this 5 minute run-through of our Promotional video (in a 'BackupAgent skin'):


As a Partner of BackupAgent, or as one of their resellers, you can now obtain your own re-branded copy of this movie. It is THE way to enthuse your customers for purchasing your Online Backup Service. Please contact your Partner Account Manager if you are interested in your own version of this movie.

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.

The partner addressed our tech support, because not all data seemed to be restored correctly. After some hours of thorough analysis of the data by our CTO and me, we discovered that the partner apparently was using the wrong encryption key. This rang a bell at the side of the partner and after checking their administration they retrieved the correct encryption key for restoring. Now all relevant data was restored correctly and the customer was back in business.

The example shows that in some cases good software must be complemented by adequate and responsive support. The customer was under great pressure to get back to business within a reasonable timeframe. This - yet another - satisfied customer also shows that our partner model allows us to prevent bankruptcy in case of data loss.

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.

Previously I compared online backup with insurances. Most of the users think that they’ll never need the backed up data, only in case of a major disaster (fire, theft, etc). This actually does not seem to be the case, according to our own findings.

We hold partner surveys on a frequent basis. This way we know exactly what is on their minds and how we can improve our products, support and services. A question that usually is adopted in the survey is: ‘Have you or one of your customers ever needed a restore? The average answer is compelling: on average 89% of the users have been in need of their backed up data at one time or another. That implies that only 11% of users have never needed a restore.

This illustrates that online backup is actually a more dynamic solution than an average insurance. Apparently users are more often in need of backed up data as they initially think. The most common situations are:

• Restoring an accidently deleted file or folder, or
• Restoring an earlier version of a file or folder.

These are quite convenient features of our online backup software, which come with the product automatically. Typically, most restores are not caused by disaster, but by little day-to-day problems our users encounter.

I can’t think of an insurance company that would be happy if 89% of their customers would use their insurance policy to claim an amount of money, or a portion of it. Again, with online backup this is different. At BackupAgent, we are very happy to know that customers frequently use our software to restore data. After all, the backup is just the means to an ultimate goal: restoring data when needed…