A bumper first year - helped largely by its partners - has forced StorageCraft Asia-Pacific to expand its Australian operations and move to larger Sydney premises.
The vendor, which offers storage products based on the Real-Time Recovery model, will now be located in North Sydney.
"The past 14 months have been exceptional for us, especially when you consider that when we started in Australia in April 2006 we had zero customers, zero partners and zero awareness for StorageCraft or ShadowProtect," regional manager for Asia-Pacific, Greg Wyman, said. "Thanks mostly to our partners, we have now sold more than 3000 licenses."
Wyman said the new office would accommodate its increased headcount and in-house seminar and technical training facilities. Recently, the company established a Technical Training team and a Professional Service team, and launched its Australia-wide monthly ShadowProtect 101 technical training courses - a free 3-hour foundation course on its flagship product.
"In the past 45 days, we have trained more than 275 people on our technology and the benefits that real-time recovery delivers," Wyman said. "We have now started providing professional services through our channel partners as we engage in larger, more complex deployments."
Wyman claimed one of the key reasons for the company's success was that more and more customers and partners were becoming disillusioned with tape-based backup products.
"They are understanding that tape is being relegated to an archival product, not a backup solution," he said. "Customers are now looking for storage solutions that are fast, easy, reliable and affordable and provide real-time data protection and recovery."
StorageCraft recently launched its Australian Partner Engagement Program (PEP). Several of the components are now live.
"We have a program running [ValuePacks] for our partners that enable them to make a 50 per cent margin on our software - and they do not have to jump through hoops or certification programs to qualify," Wyman said. "We are seeing more integrators and partners selling ShadowProtect to replace existing backup products, but also as a way to leverage increased disk sales, tape consolidation, virtualisation and professional services and helping a customer move to next-generation real-time recovery with an affordable solution."
Another element is the IT Edition to partners. "It leverages our Real-Time Recovery engine and enables an engineer to take an ExactState image of a customer's production system [server, desktop or laptop] without installing any software on the target system. Once they make changes on the customer's system, if a problem develops, they can roll back in minutes to the pre-changed state with confidence. They can also use it as a migration tool with the Hardware Independent Restore capabilities. This allows our partners to migrate a server from an old server to brand new server in minutes savings upwards of eight hours per server migration. "