More U.K. companies storing data in the U.S

Many don’t realize that online back-up companies’ services can be utilized from other countries, and that doing so may save time and money. There are several key reasons for this trend:

1) Data center density laws in the U.K., which are not in place in the U.S., allow data centers in the U.S. to provide more power per server cabinet. This is more convenient for online backup resellers, giving them relatively limitless storage. U.S. data centers are able to provide five times the amount of power and five times the amount of storage per cabinet compared to data centers in the U.K. By being able to condense the data centers and use less real estate space, online backup companies in the U.S. are able to offer their services at a much lower price.

2) The currency exchange rate is presently in the U.K.’s favor. One U.S. dollar equals .61 British pounds – meaning that anyone living in the United Kingdom will pay £12 for every $20.

3) Although it may seem like the U.K. is a great distance from the U.S., in reality the countries are only a few fiber hops away in the electronic world. The ping time/latency from the U.S. to the U.K. shows relatively no speed difference than if the backup company were in the same country.  

Almost half of XZ Backup’s customer base is international, with a substantial presence in the U.K. XZ even provides its customers with a technical support/service phone number for London, so that the company is more easily accessible for both users and resellers in the U.K.

Building an IT Brand

Branding is a hot topic – from personal branding (what you relay about yourself through your actions and communications), to branding a company or product (through marketing, public relations, and other avenues). Whether for a person, company, or product, branding is necessary to distinguish from the competition and stand out in the market.

And that certainly applies for the IT marketplace. IT consultants, solution providers, and value added resellers (VARs) need to communicate who they are, how they’re different, and provide their clients with a unique and dependable service. Vertical Systems Reseller recently featured a Q&A with Jonathan Fisher, COO of BrandExtract, on ‘The Key to Brand Recognition’ (full article below). Jonathan discusses the key for solution providers to stay competitive with the big IT companies: “Build a value proposition around the big brand” and show the client how valuable your service is.

One way for IT consultants to brand themselves and create added value is through white label online backup. Online backup resellers can provide their clients all the necessary IT services in a one-stop shop, including 100 percent transparent and reliable backup, under their brand name instead of the online backup company’s name.

This added service saves the client time and money and allows the consultant to charge premium pricing for premium service. And if the competition does not provide branded online backup, then you’re already one step ahead in the market.

Full Q&A from Vertical Systems Reseller:

The Key to Brand Recognition

4/5/2011

By Lisa Terry
Everyone knows it’s important to market their business. But what about branding? As the IT marketplace shifts to one based on services rather than product margins, it’s important for solution providers to emphasize their own brand over their software and hardware partners. VSR talks to a branding expert Jonathan Fisher, chairman and COO of BrandExtract, about how technology companies can build and sustain their brands.

What is branding?
A brand is a person’s perception of a product, service, experience, or organization.

The marketplace has something they want or need, and you have a product or service you want or need to provide. The art of branding is to make those overlap as much as possible. The greater you can align the perception with what the market truly needs, the more compelling. When they are aligned you build loyalty.

… Continue Reading

Cloud Computing to Drive $6.4 Billion in Server Hardware Spending by 2014

Cloud computing is really changing the landscape because it gives executives and managers IT options that scale with complexity, as well as offer flexible pricing models. But let’s not forget, cloud computing is just another term for network computing, or processing information across machines instead of on one local machine. In a lot of ways the entire internet is one machine, with redundancy across the system, and copies of information across wide sets of individual nodes (think of mp3s and movies even).

What we’re watching is the emergence of network computing applications, and that is what is driving the broader narrative. If it’s Amazon’s Elastic Infrastructure, or Google’s App Engine, or XZ Backup’s White Label Backup program (had to drop a plug), then it’s a service which takes advantage of networked machines to do jobs ranging from serving websites, to backing up local data to an offsite and redundant system.

Cloud adoption isn’t just about the industrial infrastructure required to support users from only desktop machines, but increasingly with phones and the emerging tablet market. Verizon’s new Droid is getting great reviews, and has iPhone customers in it’s targets, so healthy competition is revving up. Also wireless networks such as 4g LTE and WiMax are being built as fast as they can get the capital.  In a lot of ways the ground work is being laid, and the future looks bright for the IT sector.

Check out the latest research from IDC for numbers and analysis.

Cloud Computing to Drive $6.4 Billion in Server Hardware Spending by 2014

Cloud Computing to Drive $6.4 Billion in Server Hardware Spending by 2014

FRAMINGHAM, Mass., July 30, 2010 – Cloud computing presents a viable option for IT organizations seeking to reduce the complexity within their IT environments, either by means of converged systems that arrive pre-integrated and ready to use (for private clouds) or systems that are offsite entirely (public cloud). In both scenarios, the pursuit of cloud computing options will drive new spending on server hardware. International Data Corporation (IDC) forecasts that server hardware revenue for public cloud computing will grow from $582 million in 2009 to $718 million in 2014. Server revenue for the larger private cloud market will grow from $2.6 billion to $5.7 billion in the same time period.

… Continue Reading

The South African IT Race Is On

The managed services industry is growing rapidly across the globe, everywhere we are finding phenomenal numbers. If you look at revenue breakdowns for public companies in this space, you can clearly see why there’s lots of excitement.

We’d like to bring your attention to South African technology firm EOH, a company with no debt and 212M in cash reserves, who in the last year experienced 20% gains in their Managed Services business. You can find the details in the presentation below, note the segmental reporting on page 7. Over half of EOH’s business is managed services, and the numbers they’re reporting match the trending we found in India last week.
EOH_Bk_T2IB02469~2

Enabling Disaster Recovery for Enterprise and SMB

A lot of companies out there, especially in the Small and Medium Business space, have absolutely no disaster recovery program in place (up to 40% of Enterprise customers have no validation procedures in place, according to Info Tech Research). So an essential part of any DR go-to-market strategy for the SMB segment (including Enterprise) must include a comprehensive plan for addressing all of the business, communication, and technical processes required for successful deployment of DR Managed Services. Here is some information that we think is useful moving forward:

Essentials Storyboard Enabling Disaster Recovery

The Economist: Big Data On Its Way

We mentioned “Big Data” in a blog post a few days ago, so we would like to point you in the direction of an Economist piece entitled Data, data everywhere. It’s a great run through of the trend, and you walk away with a few solid numbers. What’s the takeaway? Data is a new economic input, on par with labor and capital. New forms of businesses will rise up in the next decade, and their models will rely on information generated by not just desktop computers, but cloud computing platforms, mobile phones, gps sensors, and enumerable other devices that will come to market. We appear to be in the beginning stages, so stay on the lookout.

Special report

A special report on managing information

Data, data everywhere

Information has gone from scarce to superabundant. That brings huge new benefits, says Kenneth Cukier (interviewed here)—but also big headaches

WHEN the Sloan Digital Sky Survey started work in 2000, its telescope in New Mexico collected more data in its first few weeks than had been amassed in the entire history of astronomy. Now, a decade later, its archive contains a whopping 140 terabytes of information. A successor, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, due to come on stream in Chile in 2016, will acquire that quantity of data every five days.

… Continue Reading

What About All the Data?

XZ Backup is primarily in the B2B Storage space providing a complete solutions stack for companies looking to leverage an Infrastructure-as-a-Service utility model for quick integration of Enterprise Online Backup into their business.

We are in daily contact with resellers who are successfully using our management system to deploy disaster recovery services to their established client bases.

If you do a Google Search for “storage growth” you can find all sorts of resources on the numbers relating to disk space sold, market segmentation, and future projections.

Storage Sprawl a Catalyst for High-Growth Data Deduplication Market

With analysts putting data growth in the range of 50 percent or more per year, storing duplicated data is just adding insult to injury.

According to one source, duplication rates run as high as 30 percent or more among companies that don’t have the appropriate policies and tools in place. This might help explain why data deduplication is considered one of the top technologies of the next decade, and why IT solution providers must pay more attention to this still-small-but-growing market segment.

The opportunity is there, the question is how can we take advantage? We believe with our proven program, on-demand infrastructure, and branded customer management system, anyone in the Technology space can now offer their own off-Site, HIPAA compliant, data online backup service.

Data boom to drive storage growth

Storage solutions market in South Asia and the Middle East is expected to grow over next few years, riding on a boom in data growth and enterprises’ need for business continuity, disaster recovery, and regulatory compliance.

Market in India, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Sri Lanka is estimated to climb from $653.4 million in 2008 to $2146.4 million in 2015, says Frost & Sullivan’s Emerging Storage Technologies and Adoption in South Asia and Middle East.

Business continuity, disaster recovery, and regulatory compliance. We are seeing these same responses from our channel Partners. Even the NSA is preparing to store Yottabytes of data by 2015.

The Data is out there, the question is how to get to it, how to maximize your resources to capture the market while it’s still experiencing hyper growth.