The solution to SaaS data being deleted, lost or corrupted
Backupify's CEO Rob May and I spoke about his company, his goals, and what keeps him up at night. Backupify provides a simple, reliable, and secure approach to backing up cloud application data, offering an all-in-one archiving, search and restore solution for the most popular online services including Google Apps, Salesforce.com, Facebook, Twitter and more.
Backupify ensures that organizations can access and control their most critical data, and prevents loss from external threats, user error, or service failure. I spoke to Rob from Backupify's Cambridge, Massachusetts offices.
What makes Backupify different?
Rob May: Compared to other cloud to cloud backup vendors, Backupify is built for large enterprises. We offer several things that larger enterprises need that other vendors do not offer, such as configurable data retention, individual account encryption (competitors use AWS bucket level encryption), multi-administrative functionality that is independent from the administrators you can set up in Google Apps, and the industry's best Service Level Agreement. We are also multi-app, and support more SaaS applications than any other vendor.
What are Backupify’s short, mid and long-term goals?
Rob May: Short-term, we are rolling out some new features as part of World Backup Day (March 31st). Mid-term, we are expanding into other applications, beyond Google Apps, Salesforce.com, and the social media services we support. Long-term, we are focused on moving more up-market and building more functionality for larger enterprises.
Who is the target market and do you find that is who you are getting as customers?
Rob May: Our target market is companies using many SaaS applications that are between 200 and 2,000 employees. The majority of our customers fall into that target.
From the perspective of a start-up, what did you do wrong and what did you really get right?
Rob May: We got our target market wrong initially. We were very consumer-focused and that market was too expensive to go after, given the target price points. What we really got right was choosing the right business applications to back up. Google Apps and Salesforce.com are large markets, so it is easy to be successful. We also made the hard decision to do more work early on to build a login and administration system that is independent of the apps we backup.
Our competitors, on the other hand, require your backup administrators to be the same as your Google Apps administrators, and their authentication is tied into Google, so if Google Apps is unavailable, so are your backups. On Backupify, you can set administrators independently. It was a lot of extra work for us, but that decision has really paid off. We win almost every deal against our competitors for very large accounts.
Where do you see tech going in the next 5 years? What will we be doing differently?
Rob May: The most exciting trend to me is the Internet of Things. More devices will have microprocessors, and will be accessible remotely. It opens up an incredible opportunity for innovation.
As the CEO, what keeps you up at night?
Rob May: Mostly my kids. Relative to Backupify though, not a lot, we are doing pretty well. I worry a little about the ability of these SaaS APIs to support the kinds of data loads we need.