Yesterday I had a conversation with one of our reseller partners and he told me that he pitches our online backup product (branded as his own service) as an insurance. When he is selling the product to his customers he compares it with a car, health or property insurance. You pay a recurring fee for the service (insurance), but
you hope you’ll never need it. He even told his customers that remote backup will become a commodity, just like insurances. Who on earth would not insure his car or property these days? The same thing will happen to your digital data in a few years time.
I thought this was a very interesting comparison. However, the comparison is not 100% correct and differs on 2 very important points. And these differences make online backup even more attractive to the customer, if you ask me.
Payout
If your car gets stolen or your house is damaged by fire, weather or other means , you have to get into a very complex and time-consuming process with the insurance company. You actually have to prove that you suffered damage and
if you are lucky, the insurance company pays out. But even then, you don’t get exactly the back but most likely only get a percentage
of the actual value of the damaged object, since it was not brand new anymore when it got damaged. With online backup, obviously, this is different. In case of a disaster, you get your all data back. 100%. Just like that and no questions asked. Because that is what you paid for, right? I think this is a mayor advantage over the ‘standard’ insurances.
Test
Imagine this; you ask a traditional insurance company to send you a test of the payout of their insurance policy. “Hi Mr. Insurance, could you show me how you transfer the money I deserve into my account after my car gets stolen? I just want to make sure that I have tested the whole procedure before I decide to sign up for your insurance”. I guess not. And this is understandable. If you could, you would find out all the nasty details, as illustrated above. Remote backup gives you the
possibility to test the full procedure of the restore (payout). Very easy and simple, available any time of the day, whenever you want it. Moreover, we always advise our customers to test the restore procedure, so they know what to do in case of a real disaster and, in such case, they have their data back as soon as possible.
You see, the analogy between online backup and insurances looks obvious. However, it is not 100% correct and online backup even has significant advantages. And that is exactly what I told our reseller partner yesterday. Now his sales pitch is even better.
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?
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.
Yesterday I arrived in Seattle for the Microsoft Hosting Summit 2009. In the airplane I realized that I forgot all my business cards…pretty inconvenient if you have your own booth at the show.
A while ago I visited Washington DC to visit a potential partner, DS3 Datavaulting. At that time the country was still in the hands of the Bush administration. Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama were enrolled in a tough Democratic
candidate election. The outcome was yet unclear.
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.
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 would like to start this blog with a famous quote from Monty Python. For several years now, I have devoted my working life to online backup and as one of the founders of BackupAgent I got married to the concept. Whenever we talk about
backup, obviously we talk about computer backup, data backup, Exchange backup etc.
