Asigra And Partners Push Cloud Backup

Asigra Highlights

• Has deep technical knowledge gained over 26 years
• Offers its agent-less software exclusively through its hundreds of global service provider partners
• Is considering a new capacity pricing scheme – lower price for backup (close to the price of disk), but an ‘appropriate’ higher one for restore
• Aims to prevent customers spending money on things they don’t use as a result
• Is partnering with NetApp to offer ‘Data Protection as a Service’ (DPaaS) through service providers
• Will have 3.5k functions in version 12 of its software
• Is part of an inexorable, but slow replacement of tape with disk
• Is a strong early Cloud Computing player

We’ve spent a very interesting couple of days in Toronto attending Asigra’s 5^th annual Partner Summit. This was a chance for hundreds of its global partners to build relationships, hear about new product developments and strategy and get to grips with the technology in the ‘hands on lab’. The conference was headed up by CEO David Farajun, who has a clear vision of where his 26 year-old company is headed. You’ll want to learn more about its plans and the role backup, restore and disaster recovery have in the era of Cloud Computing, as well as think about how the role of service providers is evolving. We’re interested in covering backup and store as a subject, having discussed Symantec’s products earlier and some of the additional products HP has added through the acquisition of Autonomy.
From a customer perspective Asigra is interesting for any one who runs a single site and is looking for 2^nd site protection from a service provider. It’s carved out a good niche, because the model works well for its resellers. It is not alone (Attix5 is another example) and we think these approaches are better than customising IBM Tivoli. The billing part of the application also appeals to resellers. It is cleverly delegating sales to the channel, because there many VARs and resellers at a local level (we believe 25k in the UK alone for instance) – all with local relationships.

Asigra’s Approach And Vision

David talked about Asigra’s 3 values under the headings of people, products and performance, giving some indications about the company’s future directions. In particular:

• People – the company has around 100 staff, who joined David on stage and he also thanked the audience, especially because it has a 100% indirect sales strategy.
• Product – Asigra was the forerunner of cloud backup before anyone knew what the term was, developing the concept of off-site backup 26 years ago. Asigra will be rolling out some new features in the next version of its software.
• Performance – Asigra estimates its offerings are used in around 1 million user sites around the world; in his presentation and throughout the conference ‘performance’ was largely taken to mean sales

Asigra’s vision is for backup to become an attribute of computing (as BIOS is today); it aims to provide tools to check data before, pre and post backup. It believes the value of data recovery will be based on capacity. One of its most interesting concepts is a change in pricing: as David puts it, the new model will be ‘$X/TB for backup’ and ‘$XX/TB for recovery’, with the former tracking close to the cost of disk (currently around $300/TB) and the latter charged at ‘an appropriate’ cost. Undoubtedly such a scheme matches users unease with paying for things they don’t use (possibly most notable with traditional hardware maintenance), but the ‘appropriate’ level for recovery will need to be considerable to make up for the discounting of that of backup. Such a move will make pricing more similar to the tape market, where you often need to do multiple reads to get your data back. Surprisingly we heard few negative views of the new model by attendees, so it will be interesting to see how it works out when launched. This will bring backup and restore pricing to a quasi-utility model – matching similar movements in other areas of the IT market.

‘Data Protection as a Service’ Through NetApp Partnership

HP is an Asigra partner, using its software in its Electronic Vaulting for Enterprise service and it will be interesting to see how these are balanced against its Autonomy offerings (including with the digital assets it acquired from Iron Mountain).
It has a more notable partnership with NetApp, who sponsored – and spoke at – the Partner Summit. NetApp combines its arrays with Asigra’s software to offer ‘Data Protection as a Service’. This approach is somewhat akin to storage hypervising in taking data from heterogeneous sources (EMC, IBM and Hitachi for instance), but different in using just NetApp’s arrays as the target.
NetApp first offered virtualised storage with the introduction of Multistore in 2000 and succeeded in introducing systems in which data from one department could be entirely separated from another (Telstra in Australia is an example of an early company which passed the close inspection of the chief security officer for such a deployment). In his presentation to the partners NetApp’s Gary Hocking suggested there were considerable savings when launching Cloud services sequentially by sharing the system across all deployments. The joint offering is based on NetApp’s storage efficiency and management tools and Asigra’s software and sales/marketing support. But it’s not NetApp’s only alliance in this area – Symantec’s Replication Director is designed to speed up the recovery from central management of replicated Snapshots using its OpenStorage (OST) interface to integrate with ‘storage-efficient’ NetApp snapshots.

Partners Cover Industry Sectors, Region And Business

Much of the conference involved sales motivation and marketing suggestions for the partners. Asigra is keen to cover the waterfront in terms of its partners reach across industry sectors and regions, although it remains agnostic in terms of the size of customer. We picked up many examples of industries these service providers are involved, such as education (which we calculate as only representing 2% of ITC spending worldwide) and legal sectors. Most engagements involve ‘spend to save’ justifications and many are still replacing tape-based processes. The partners were almost universally pro Asigra, citing the depth functionality and the advantages of its agent-less approach.

Some Conclusions – Asigra Well Positioned, Needs To address Virtualisation More Coherently

Backup, restore and disaster recovery are important areas and the technology is going through a slow process of change from tape- to disk-based systems (see Figure 2). These are some of the first areas in which users are moving to public Cloud offerings. Asigra has been doing the heavy lifting over 26 years to take advantage. We believe its annual revenues are in the region of $200 million and even if less, it must have fantastic revenue/headcount. It has clear ideas on how its partners can make more sales by investing in dedicated marketing and realigning their sales on relationship building using social media. It seems somewhat slow to address virtualisation, currently lacking the full-on VMware plug-in approach of others, but this may reflect the relatively lowly position of its chosen applications than a lack of knowledge about what to develop. As a private company it has the advantage of not having to disclose financial information to the outside world and resists contracts with the few organisations which make it a requirement of doing business.
We like its clear vision – especially in moving to more utility-like pricing: but, most of all, the enthusiasm of its partners.