Backup Anytime

Backupanytime interview with Sekar Vembu of Vembu Technologies.

Backupanytime exclusive:

When we approached Vembu Technologies about interviewing Sekar Vembu we expected that if an interview were to be granted (and we certainly didn’t assume it would) it would be at some stage in the distant future and possibly with another senior representative of Vembu Technologies. Imagine our surprise and excitement when we were informed within days by Sekar himself that he would do an interview himself and that he was available for the following weeks main interview post. You didn’t visit this page to read our narative so without further ado, we will got to this most insightful interview.

1. Name

Sekar Vembu

2. Company.

Vembu Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

3. Position.

Founder and CEO

4. Marital status, family members.

Married. My wife’s name is Vidhya. We have 2 Kids - a four and half year old son, Sanjay and a two and a half year old daughter, Shreya.

5. Education

B.Tech, Mechanical Engineering and M.S, Operations Research - both from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras, India

6. Pastimes / Hobbies

I am never able to answer this question since my 5th grade. Not that I am a workaholic - far from it, I personally believe I am quite a lazy and laid back guy - unless I can motivate myself with some sense of purpose. I also seem to have a ’single tasking brain’ wherein I have to do anything with single minded focus. Otherwise, I do not feel like I am doing anything worthwhile. Of course, you know what I am focused on right now!

The only other activity where I used to be self-motivated was sport; especially during my college days where I used to take my Cricket and Badminton more seriously than my academics. But nowadays, I seem to enjoy
doing random and aimless reading on the Internet - the only reading I do, by the way.

7. What type of car do you drive?

I drive a Honda CRV which I’d bought when my daughter was born.

8. How long are you in the online backup business?

We have been doing this for about 4 years now. I do not want to pretend that I had a vision of the opportunity in this domain when we started out. In fact, when we started to develop a product in the Storage and Backup domain, our idea was completely different. We initially developed a Peer to Peer Backup product for SOHOs, SMBs and Home Networks. And that is where the name StoreGrid comes from. That is, storage in a grid with unused space in other computers in a network.

While we got a good number of customers & passionate users, we also got a couple of IT solution providers who started using StoreGrid to offer an online backup service to their customers. We saw a pattern there, and decided to put our focus on the online backup domain. We then started improving StoreGrid to make it especially easy for IT solution providers and MSPs to host and provide their own online backup service to their customers.

In retrospect, we believe we made the right choice as we have seen and continue to see a phenomenal growth opportunity here.

9. What are the distinguishing features of your company over the competition?

I would prefer to focus on our company’s strengths without claiming that it is something unique to us over the competition!

We have an extremely hard working culture with a collective single minded focus on delivering a world class product backed by world class technical support. I am very fond of saying “Fire in the belly counts more than smarts”. I see that fire in all the people here at Vembu! Our people have the drive to “do what it takes” to be the best. Because of this culture, I strongly believe, we have a superior capability to serve our partners and customers better than anyone else and therefore aim to be the best in our business segment.

10. What are the achievements of which you are most proud?

I am quite proud of the fact that as a business we were able to sign up close to a thousand MSP/Service Provider partners across the world in a short period of time - and that too, just on the strength of our product, rather than creating and riding on hype.

In this context, I should add that I am not someone who is easily satisfied. When I achieve something which I set out to achieve, it appears trivial to me after I achieve it. Call it a classic case of the journey and the
anticipation of reaching a destination being more rewarding than reaching the destination itself, but I think this is the reason I am able to sustain
my motivation and drive for a long period of time. So, we have a long way to
go before I would (if ever) feel fully satisfied and truly be proud of our
achievements.

11. Where do you see the industry going?

I have a very positive outlook on the online backup industry for the long term. If you consider the SMB market segment which is the segment we typically focus on (through our service provider partners), I believe we have just scratched the surface when it comes to adoption of online backups. As broadband bandwidth improves and price of storage falls further, it would make even more business sense to keep your important data in a ’service provider managed’ storage cloud. I feel this is an inevitable transformation that will happen over the next 5 years.

I also believe the industry will not consolidate around just a couple of players. Backup is not like skype where you install & forget it and it just works (most of the time, at least). It is much more complex and it requires constant monitoring and management. Very simply, that is the nature of the beast! Therefore, the MSPs and the IT solution providers have a very crucial role to play. So as the online backup industry evolves it will be more and more a channel play for us, the software vendors.

12. What advice would you give to business people who have data backup concerns?

I do not think there is any preaching required to convince anyone abut the criticality of protecting business data. Everyone is hopefully aware of that.

So my first and foremost advice is to not treat data backup as something which can be run on auto-pilot. Data backup is not about just the software or the storage. Business people should realize that data protection is more of a process. You either need to have an internal ‘champion’ who worries about a robust process to protect your critical data or you should simply outsource this function to a local MSP or an IT solution provider.

I hear lots of people talking about online backup being a commodity! I strongly believe that this is very misleading; I urge business people to not fall for such rhetoric. It is true that storage is becoming a commodity but data backup is not and never will be. Data protection is a process and the data protection software is a facilitator of such a process. As with any process, these processes have to keep evolving as your business evolves and that is the reason you need a champion to continuously improve the data protection processes and ensure it addresses all eventualities.

13. What advice would you give to I.T. companies considering offering online backup to their clients?

I am sure the IT solution providers and MSPs know fully well that online data backup is a serious business. So, what ever I mentioned above as ‘advice to businesses’ apply to them too. If you are offering an online backup service, never treat it as something running on auto-pilot. There are so many ways things can go wrong. You should have a robust process in place to make sure that when things go wrong you are aware of it and are in a position to quickly take corrective action. This is the fundamental reason online data backup cannot be provided as a commodity service - especially for serious businesses. As trusted advisors, solution providers have a big role to play in educating their business customers. If you try to commodotize yourself by competing with the consumer focused mega online storage vendors, you will never have satisfied customers in the long run.

14. From where do you get your inspiration?

This is a tough one. Quite honestly, I really do not know. If I try to make something up, it will sound more like a platitude rather than something which comes from my heart. I think there is some fundamental urge we all have to succeed and make a difference to the world. I feel these are questions you can honestly answer after you’ve succeeded in a big way; of course, that’s also when you can get away with sounding banal.

15. Where do you see yourself in five years time?

As a business I am very confident that in five years we would be reasonably successful. Beyond that, I never really like to predict how big our business will be. But one thing I am quite sure of is that we would be serving a much wider segment of the data protection market place than we are serving today and I foresee ourselves working with tens of thousands of partners.

Personally, I will be just two times twenty one years old in five years. And I am sure I would still feel as young as ever - with the same “fire in my belly”.

Ed. Thanks Sekar for your frank and insightful look at the industry from the viewpoint of a leading company principal.

Visitors, want to see more who’s who in data? Then watch next weeks who’s who in data.