Vembu Technologies to tap Indian backup software market

NR Sethuraman

Chennai

Chennai-based online storage provider Vembu Technologies plans to launch a
professional edition of backup software in the Indian market, which will back up
PCs and servers to a common internal server. And they are working on signing few
distributors and resellers for it.

“We have already signed up few resellers in Bangalore and Kolkata and are
planning to include more channel partners. The discussions are on with various
value added resellers and we will focus on both small and medium business
customers for this product,” informed Sekar Vembu, Director Vembu
Technologies.

The three-year-old company focuses on online backup storage space. Its
primary model is building online backup software and focus on regional service
providers across the world to provide online back up service using their
software.

“The service providers use our software and provide backup services in
their own datacenters and provide online back up services to their customers,”
said Sekar. Vembu technologies follows 100 percent channel network for taking
their products and has tied up with almost 600 partners across the globe and a
couple of partners in India.

They mainly focus the regional service providers (system integrators) who are
targeting the SMB segment. Another interesting thing about Vembu is it doesn't
have any other presence outside India and its total operations are controlled
from the only office in Chennai.

Despite not having a presence in the US, 70 percent of Vembu Technologies'
clients are from USA and Canada. Talking about the Indian scenario in providing
online storage, Sekar said, the broadband penetration need to be more
aggressive.

“I think it will take time for the Indian market to catch on to the
services like Saas, online backup etc. as these are all data intensive things.
So packing up things and screw them through Internet needs good bandwidth.
Presently the Internet connectivity to the SMB's are not up to the mark and
the available bandwidth is also expensive,” he asserted.

Secondly he feels that the Indian SMBs haven't matured enough to backup
their data in a remote place and outsource these services to a service provider
not knowing that this will take less time. “Once the bandwidth cost becomes
cheap and SMB customers would prefer to outsource their backup activities, we
would like to focus in India for the online back up software. The cost of
setting up a datacenter and maintaining it are also very costly in India. And
that is why we have come up with the professional edition software especially
for the Indian market through which most of the SMB customers would get
benefited,” said Sekar.

He also said that keeping the Indian market in mind the professional edition
has been priced very competitively to attract the SMB customers and licensing
models would be introduced for the resellers benefit. Vembu Technologies is also
planning to tie up with Amazon.com, who are providing storage as a utility
service and bring them to India.

“Anyone can store as much as they want in Amazon Datacenter and pay for the
utility alone according to both bandwidth use and storage use, which needs no
capital investment for setting up a datacenter and maintaining it. Being in
India, it would be easy for us to integrate ourselves with Amazon and we are
studying the economical aspects of that,” Sekar said.