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Tony Cerqueira, Cofio’s chief executive officer, said the company currently has several MSPs on board. Those include eBackup in Canada, Cloud Data Ltd. in Europe, and Bit-Isle Inc. in Japan. He said he believes the company’s channel business will grow, noting that VARs and SIs, not just MSPs, are looking to offer hosted services including backup.

When the Cofio channel program emerges sometime this quarter the company’s founders will be covering some old ground in the storage field. Cerqueira, along with chief technology officer Fabrice Helliker, founded BakBone Software Inc. in 2000. That company launched a channel program in 2004.

Cofio, meanwhile, positions itself as a provider of unified data protection technologies. MSPs can offer backup, deduplication, replication, archiving, compliance tracking among other functions under a single platform, Cerqueira noted.

The company’s approach appears similar to Actifio, which sells a suite of storage products that pulls together components such as backup, snapshot and replication. Actifio launched a partner program earlier this year.

Cerqueira, however, pointed to CommVault; Asigra; Symantec’s Backup Exec and NetBackup products; and Double-Take as its main competitors. The latter was acquired last year by Vision Solutions.

Remote Backup

AIMstor’s SRS offers up one hook for MSPs. The feature provides synchronization  among data repositories — between a customer’s local data repository and an off-site repository at a MSP-hosted facility, for example. SRS lets MSPs synchronize all or part of a repository and establish how often synchronization occurs. A service provider could perform hourly transfers of application data and weekly transfers of OS images, according to Cofio.

MSPs have the option of purchasing a permanent AIMstor license or opting for a subscription licensing model.