Company Spotlight Carbonite
They were interrupted when Flowers wife entered and announced that her laptop containing two years worth of baby photos had been stolen out of her car. A short time later, the hard drive on Friend’s daughter’s computer crashed and she lost a term paper she had been working on for six weeks that was due at the end of the week.
After spending $1,200 to repair the computer and failing to retrieve the paper, it dawned on Friend that there was the potential for a business there.
He came up with the idea of unlimited backup for a fixed price because it would eliminate the need for a complicated user interface. And thus, Carbonite was born.
“We looked into some technology ideas for how we could do this and make it really simple and the objective was to try to make a backup that was as simple as buying insurance for your car,” Friend, Carbonite’s president and CEO, said. “Literally, it’s got to be simple enough for my 91-year old mother to use!”
Carbonite’s motto, “Backup. Simple.” was born from this. Since the company was founded in 2005 it has grown to 53 employees and Flowers is now its CTO. Carbonite has backed up over 2.1 billion files and recovered over 160 million files that would have otherwise been lost forever.
Friend commented that the scale of Carbonite’s operation helps to set it apart from other companies in the space. Due to its venture capital backing, he couldn’t give the exact number of clients the company has but he said it’s well over 100,000.
Carbonite backs up over 25 million new files every day. Its data center offers over 2.5 petabytes of storage, the equivalent of 3,000 500 GB hard drives, and adds about 250 terabytes, the equivalent of 25 million high-resolution MP3s, each month.
“I think the real differentiator in the long run is going to be, can you establish yourself as a trusted partner in backing up and protecting people’s data,” Friend said.
Online backup is going to become a commodity, much like virus protection, in the future according to Friend. It will be a matter of which company can capture the biggest share of the market. He envisions Carbonite becoming to similar to McAfee, Norton and other antivirus software, a solution that’s automatically bundled with PCs. It’s already based on a recurring subscription model similar to antivirus vendors.
“Our strategy is spend a lot of money on marketing and turn ourselves into the brand that everybody knows about when you think of backup,” Friend stated.
Since most people are uncertain about uploading documents to the Internet, Carbonite is engaged in developing relationships with recognized companies like Microsoft. The software giant currently bundles Carbonite with its Microsoft Money solution.
TDS Telecom, a mid-size ISP in the mid-western US, includes Carbonite with its DSL service package. The solution is also available through the Value-Added Reseller (VAR) channel and an affiliate program.
“People want to feel you’re a partner and not just some faceless company out there that they don’t know what’s going to happen with their data,” he said. “So, we’re really working on building on very sophisticated customer support systems so that when you call in we know all about you and we don’t waste your time.”
Friend said that Carbonite offers its customers a variety of support options such as e-mail, live chat, live text chat and telephone. Ninety percent of customer issues are usually resolved within 24 hours. He said that 97 to 98 percent of Carbonite’s users would recommend it to friends and family.
As the company heads into 2008, it is looking to test out a Mac version of the product. Anyone who’s interested can sign up at beta@carbonite.com.