"If we had to pay the bandwidth costs of a decade ago, it just wouldn't work."
Here's Cunningham doing what sensible companies do slides
Businesses can look at the cloud backup model as a solid alternative to tape but can it really deliver your data back to you faster than a truck? If the SLAs i365 is promising your information back to you within 24 hours then cloud backup is undoubtedly an enticing prospect.
The actual technology offered by i365 is about as disruptive as bringing a bottle of wine to a dinner party, but the company offers a wide array of EVault solutions to cater for the hybrid environment. As long as the company doesn't make any serious missteps, it'll be a notable player in the cloud backup market.
Future gazing?
i365's model looks set just wait for the customers to come in and then supply them. According to the executives we met, the company won't even have to spend much on marketing thanks to already entrenched demand for cloud backup.
Resting on your laurels could be risky of course, but given the expected growth of the cloud storage market and the vendor's sensible approach (have you got it yet? They. Are. Sensible.) , i365 will have little to worry about.
The executives said they would add more data centres when they needed to. As demand grows, i365 will scale out. Simple.
The company has the hybrid market covered, but will we ever see the day when companies want purely cloud-based backup?
"That may happen but we don't see that as something happening now. It's the combination of on premise and cloud, not either or," said Cunningham.
Either way, i365 will be around to provide for what customers want in backup.
Verdict
i365 has a logical business model and is targeting just the right audience in the mid-market space. It isn't overshooting, it's being careful and making serious headway in the emerging cloud storage industry.
This Steady Eddie approach will most likely serve i365 well. By not overspending on a plethora of data centres it only has 11 across the world whilst serving tens of thousands of businesses across the globe, it has a model which seems almost infallible at the minute. Don't spend much, sell to many a winning formula.
The company does not even use up its own infrastructure when it comes to those customers using i365 channel partners' data centres.
i365 won't redefine the IT world, but it will most likely earn a tidy sum thanks to businesses' move to the hybrid model and the company's apparent lack of expenditure.
