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Company: i365 – A Seagate Company
Started: 1997 (EVault)
Located: Santa Clara, California
Geography: Global
Market: Cloud-based Storage
Products: Data backup, eDiscovery, and Data Recovery
Key Customers: ArtsMemphis, Meritan, CBRE and People’s First Community Bank
Website: i365
Recent News:
I asked Valerie Fawzi, Vice President of Product Marketing at i365 a few questions about her business and her view of the SaaS and Cloud Computing market in 2009.
Did you start out as a Software-as-a-Service company?
i365 is a wholly owned subsidiary of Seagate and was created through a number of acquisitions around the data protection market, starting with EVault. eVault was started in 1997 and was acquired by Seagate in 2007 and was always based on a software subscription business model.
We service mid-market companies who have between 10 and 1,000 employees. i365 also services large companies but usually for their remote or branch offices. I365 is an online service, that protects data on Windows, Linux Unix and other operating systems on both virtual and physical platforms.
Why do your customers buy from i365?
It’s hard today for small business customers because they have to glue together many different storage solutions but they would prefer to have a single provider. The small business customer usually only has a small number of IT resources to handle these important storage and backup challenges, and i365 offers a broad array of storage solutions and we make it easy purchase and support our products through many different channels.
For example, in October we announced EVault Offsite Replication Service that offers a hybrid pricing model, a passive vault and disaster recovery including D2D2T – Data to Disc to Tape, D2C - Disc to Cloud, and D2D2C - Disc to Disc to Cloud.
We provide our technology in many different formats including a license for large companies, a managed service and as a hardware/software appliance. All these deployment options are based on our same technology platform in the Cloud.
i365 distributes our solutions both directly and through channel alliances with major tele-communictions companies. We can offer our services through one of our ten SAS70 Type II data centers across North America and Europe.
What do you see as the key trend emerging in the SaaS industry?
We think customers are going to be careful about moving to the Cloud but would be more open to a blended on-premise and Cloud solution. The ability to provide storage to a variety of on-premise solutions like Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, SQL databases and even desktops that could be backed up in the Cloud. This is especially attractive for customers in regulated industries such as healthcare, legal and pharmaceuticals who need a data protection plan. This is the type of bridge approach that customers are looking for from us.
What is your outlook for 2009?
We have recently had an important change in management, Terry Cunningham, the former President and COO of Seagate Software, with a track record of success, has rejoined the company to head up i365. Today Seagate is the largest independent storage company. Our new vision is to use our SaaS and Clouding Computing core competencies and move into becoming the leading managed services storage firm. This is a very exciting time for i365 and Seagate.
Thank you to Valerie Fawzi and Rachel Levine for contributing to this profile.
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