Anecdotal evidence suggests BackupAssist is in growth mode. The company now serves customers in 165 countries, and quarter-over-quarter growth -- largely driven by MSPs -- surged 34 percent.
Strategic’s president, Bruce Somers, tells ChannelE2E he looked for a backup solution for a long time but was met with prohibitive costs. “It just became too expensive for small businesses to backup,” he asserts. Somers worked with some bigger name solutions providers, but was “tortured by their tech support trying to get Hyper-V to backup from a host,” he says, referring to the Microsoft-developed virtualization software. “I went through probably almost 6 months trying to get this new Hyper-V to back up. And it just wasn't working.”
After a little searching, he discovered BackupAssist. Somers says they offered competitive prices and excellent support. “We really went exclusive with them pretty quickly. It was a big relief to have really great support and what we consider a great product for a great price,” he says.
Looking Back(up)
BackupAssist was created in 2002 and focuses on providing business continuity for SMBs.
The company specializes in protection for various Microsoft products, including Windows Server, Hyper-V, and Microsoft SQL Server.
The company began as a software project developed by Cortex IT Labs in 2000, designed to deal with problems with the built-in backup application for Windows NT. Since then it's grown to offer all kinds of Microsoft data solutions.
The company has been hailed for its easy interface, a claim that Somers supports. “For us, that's the biggest selling point with BackupAssist. It's really, really easy,” he says.
Intense Competition
BackupAssist's momentum sounds legitimate. But it's always difficult to pinpoint the true performance of privately held companies since they typically don't disclose actual revenues or profit figures.
The backup market is particularly competitive, especially when it comes to backup and disaster recovery (BDR) solutions for virtualized environments like Hyper-V and VMware. Veeam is perhaps the best-known provider of VMware-centric backup, and the company has rapidly grown in the Hyper-V market in recent years. Eager to build on that momentum, Veeam will host its annual VeamOn 2017 conference in May.
Additional insights from Joe Panettieri.
