This is the first in a series of articles that offer a journey through the history of our sponsors. These articles will look at where and when each company’s journey started and at highlights along the way. Vembu is one of those companies that you may not have heard of but are, in fact, actually quite large. More than 60,000 businesses worldwide have benefited from Vembu’s products via a network of more than 4,000 partners. It is very possible that indirectly you are already a customer, or perhaps you are one of the lucky ones who have heard of this company and have taken the Vembu backup and recovery jump.
Vembu Technologies was formed in 2002 by one of the five Vembu siblings, Sekar, in their father’s house in Chennai, India. The company’s groundings were in database migration. However, its roots as a backup and recovery company were firmly dug in 2004, after it sold its database migration product to AdventNet (now Zoho Corporation). Incidentally, AdventNet was founded by three of the older Vembu brothers, Sridhar, Kumar and also Sekar who left to start Vembu Technologies; their parents must be very proud.
Vembu released its first-generation backup and recovery product, the white-labeled StoreGrid, in 2005. Targeted at managed service providers, this product made significant inroads. In fact, if you host a website or blog hosted by a service provider, your hosting provider is most likely a customer of Vembu. Now, you would never know this, as StoreGrid was purchased as a white-labeled product, which allowed the service providers to skin the service with their own branding. This was a lucrative business, and as a result, over the next ten years the company grew.
In 2012, the company bought CloudNucleus, another India-based technology company, which specialized in disk image backups for physical servers and desktops. This marked the start of the next phase of its development. It integrated the CloudNucleus technology into its product set. As a result, in 2014, Vembu decided to pivot its business and sell directly to end customers. Using the experience gained with StoreGrid, they created a new technological base product launching Vembu BDR Suite for virtualized data centers. Although the suite has only been sold for two years, it is certainly not the new kid on the block. It has benefited from more than ten years of continual improvement and feature additions though the original StoreGrid product. The Vembu BDR Suite now consists of five core products and four add-on products, these being:
| VM Backup: | Backup & Replication for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V |
| IMAGE Backup: | Backup and bare metal recovery for Physical Windows Servers and Desktops |
| NETWORK Backup: | Backup solution for file/folders, applications like MS Exchange, SQL Sharepoint, AD Outlook and MySQL etc. |
| ONLINE Backup | Backup solution for file/folders, applications like MS Exchange, SQL Sharepoint, AD Outlook and MySQL etc. Directly to Vembu Cloud |
| SaaS Backup: | Backup soutions for SaaS Applications like Office 365 and Google Apps |
and:
| Vembu OffsiteDR: | A Service to enhance the Backup Server. OffsiteDR enables you to keep additional copy of backup data on-site or off-site |
| Vembu CloudDR: | A service to provide to setup up hybrid cloud environment where you can replicate additional backup copies to Vembu cloud. |
| Vembu BDR360: | Aids with the 24/7 availability by providing the flexibility to monitor and manage all Vembu BDR backup environments from as single pane of glass |
| Vembu Universal Explorer: | An agentless addition that enables the individual restoration of Items from MS Exchange, Sharepoint and Active Directory. |
The pivot has been very profitable for it. Its market demographics have completely changed. Whereas formerly it was predominately Service Provider focused, more than 70% of its revenue now comes from the US SME market. It has been self-funded and profitable since 2006. This is not a company that is going to disappear.