Company Spotlight IBackup

That’s why Woodland Hills, California’s IBackup stands out.

CEO Raghu Kulkarni readily admitted that the company’s service plans cost slightly more that some of the offerings on the market.

IBackup, however, did unveil a low-end plan for consumers, IDrive, in January 2007.

Kulkarni believes that maintaining a steady price has helped IBackup find and maintain a customer base thanks to its range of products and services. Some of the products include IBackup for Windows and Mac, SQL and Oracle server backup plus Hot Sites For Disaster Recovery.

IBackup, a subsidiary of Pro Softnet Corporation, has been around since 1999. After watching many of the companies in the same space fold after the dot com bubble burst, it became obvious that they were going to have to move away from their ad-based revenue model and switch to a subscription model, which occurred in 2003.

In addition to online backup, IBackup also offers an online storage service. Users can map the backed up data as a drive on their computer and then drag and drop the backed up data from anywhere with an Internet connection and browser access.

For instance, if a customer stores a document using their office computer, they can retrieve it from anywhere.

Additionally, users also have the option of creating sub-accounts within their account. If they want to create an account for their company’s different departments, they can do so easily. Only the respective department will have access to the sub-account.

“It gives you a lot more flexibility than most competing online backup services,” Kulkarni added.
“Our customers see the value in the features that we offer... and the ease of access, the performance, we have always been beating our competition in those areas.”

While many of their competitors are dropping their prices in a seemingly preemptive attempt to stay ahead, IBackup's strategy remains intact.

“We are getting more into the hot backups of the databases like the SQL server, Exchange and Oracle to address some of the mid-market requirements,” Kulkarni stated. “We want to address the low-end consumer, the small business and also the mid-sized. I think the combination of these would help us get through any market shakeup.”