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N R Sethuraman
Chennai
March 28th, 2008
Online storage provider Vembu Technologies has proposed to launch a
professional edition of back up software in the Indian market, and it is also
working on signing few distributors and resellers for this purpose.
"We have already signed up few resellers in Bangalore and Kolkata, and
are planning to add more channel partners. 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 service providers (SPs) use our software and provide backup
services in their own datacenters. They give online back up services to their
customers as well," said Sekar.
Talking about the Indian scenario in providing online storage, he feels that
the broadband penetration needs 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 putting
them through Internet needs good bandwidth. Presently, the Internet
connectivity to the SMBs 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 the remote place and outsourcing
their services to a service provider will take much more time. "Once the
bandwidth cost becomes cheap and SMB customers begin 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, is very costly in India.
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
benefit," said Sekar.
He informed 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.
The company 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's 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.
An interesting fact about Vembu is that it doesn't have any other presence
outside India and total operations are controlled from the only office in
Chennai. Without any presence in US, Vembu Technologies has almost 70 percent of
the clients in USA and Canada. Page(s) 1
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