This four-year-old Canadian company is bringing recovery-as-a-service to the small to mid-size enterprise (SME) market and is using the cloud to do this.
Joshua Geist, the CEO of Toronto-based Geminare, says his company enables channel partners to offer disaster recovery and business continuity services to customers using a cloud-based delivery model.
The company sells its products entirely through the channel, which is made up of distributors, MSPs, telcos, cloud hosting providers and VARs. Channel partners also have the option of white-labeling and reselling Geminare’s server replication offering, better known as Geminare Cloud Recovery, which is delivered through the cloud.
Geminare’s other product is its Cloud Storage Assurance (CSA) 2.0 solution, which is a data storage and archiving solution that enables customers to archive and search through their e-mail and file backup environments.
Instead of relying on a hardware appliance to perform backups, Geist says because Geminare’s offerings are cloud-based, all that’s required from the end-user is a VPN tunnel from the customer site to the cloud or data centre. Once this is established, all of the customer’s data is replicated into the cloud, which can be a public, private, or hybrid model.
The ideal customer base for Geminare’s products are SMEs, which are anywhere between 50 and 1,000 seats, Geist explains. This is where the company sees its sweet-spot because Geminare’s solutions bring “enterprise-class” offerings to the mid-size and downward markets.
Earlier this week, Geminare announced the latest generation of its CSA solution, which Geist says can be sold and consumed as a standalone offering, or a complementary one with disaster recovery. With CSA, customers receive the benefits of e-discovery, e-mail archiving and file archiving, to name a few things. CSA 2.0 will be available through Geminare’s network of channel partners within the coming weeks, Geist said.
“Customers can have their data backed up and archived to a public cloud of their choice,” he said.
For channel partners, Geist says Geminare’s recovery-as-a-service solution offerings give partners a chance to take advantage of “huge revenue” opportunities.
“We don’t set the price when partners go to market with the offering,” he said. “The MSRP is about $2-3 per gigabyte per month for data storage. Partners can see upwards of 60 per cent per month on margins, so there’s really no limit to the top.”
A value proposition for the solution is that Geminare’s products are what Geist calls, “vendor lock-in free,” meaning customers can migrate their data from one cloud to another without any additional cost or complication.
“We see the recovery-as-a-service space as a green field of opportunities because it’s still a fairly new market at this point,” Geist explained.
Rachel Dines, an analyst for infrastructure and operations at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass., said that the recovery-as-a-service model is a fairly recent technology and deployment phenomenon.
“Companies have been doing backup in the cloud for a long time,” Dines said. “Recovery-as-a-service is somewhat an evolution of backup-as-a-service. In terms of actual recovery in the cloud, buzz and interest really started in the past year or two.”
Dave Senf, the director of infrastructure solutions at IDC Canada, said the recovery-as-a-service area is one that makes a lot of sense from a dollars and sense point of view.
“Recovery-as-a-service is a subset of infrastructure-as-a-service or storage-as-a-service,” Senf said. “The sweet spot for moving into recovery services from a customer standpoint is in the mid-market, where an organization’s building up mountains of data and they may not have the IT budget to build out their infrastructure for the recovery of that data.”
With technological advancements, it’s now possible for channel partners to offer recover-as-a-service offerings to their customers, when they otherwise wouldn’t be able to before, Senf said. Over time, he expects the costs for solution offerings such as this to “rapidly decline.”
But even now, Senf says the interest in these types of service and deployment offerings are there.
“The percentage of Canadian organizations that are storing data in the cloud is still less than 10 per cent, but of those organizations, by 2013, they believe they’ll have 20 per cent of their data in the cloud,” Senf said.
With all of the interest in the cloud, Senf says non-cloud focused partners won’t need to worry. He says there will still be a place for partners to offer on-premise solutions for the foreseeable future.
“It will be a slow moving migration of data into the cloud, but it’s happening and it’s inevitable,” Senf explains. “Partners should look at expanding their portfolio to include cloud-based solutions and white-labeling. This model will allow for smaller VARs who traditionally resell storage to also offer cloud-based services.”
At Geminare, Geist says there’s no better time than now for partners to start offering recovery-as-a-service solutions to customers.
By using Geminare’s management portal, partners can take advantage of WebEx training courses, they can register sales and they can also place orders and do quoting for customers, he added.
“In total, we have OEM partners and partners under them, therefore giving us access to several hundreds of partners,” Geist says. In Canada, we have about 30-40 partners, but we’re always looking for partners who can help us deliver value-added services through the cloud.”
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