Vembu Attracts 900 Managed Storage Providers

More than 70 percent of successful managed service providers offer some form of managed storage, according to our MSPmentor 100 survey. Despite that lofty figure, the online storage market continues to enjoy strong growth.

One prime example: Vembu since February has attracted roughly 350 new online storage partners -- pushing its worldwide customer base to more than 900 partners, according to Lakshmanan Narayan,  president for Vembu.

Vembu's StoreGrid for Service Providers allows MSPs to launch a remote back service for customers' servers, desktops and laptops. Instead of hosting all the software and managing all the data on its own, Vembu's business model calls for MSPs to deploy and manage StoreGrid within their own network operation centers.

So far, Vembu's strategy seems to be working in multiple regions. Narayan estimates that 70 percent of Vembu's partner base is in North America, followed by 11 percent in the United Kingdom and 9 percent for the rest of Europe. The remaining 10 percent of Vembu's installed base is scattered across Australia and New Zealand (5 percent) and rest of world (5 percent).

Vembu's momentum comes at a time of heightened competition for managed storage services. Just last week, Zenith Infotech mentioned that most of their software as a service (SaaS) business development efforts focus on backup and disaster recovery. And Symantec a few days ago claimed to be making progress with the Symantec Protection Network -- a SaaS platform that currently offers online storage, with security options expected to debut late this year or in 2009. And other platform providers such as Asigra have successfully targeted the managed storage sector.