We pride ourselves in being a blog about all that is happening in the world of data backup. But if there is one thing we love more than our jobs, it’s being with our families. That’s why this holiday season has been sparse on the blog entries. We’re starting to get back into the swing of things, and there is big news in the M&A world of data backup….

Industry titan Seagate Technologies bought data storage provider EVault for a cool $185 million. You can find the full story on Yahoo! News and ZDNet. With 250 employees and over 8500 clients, EVault has been around a long time and are well established in this field. Is it a good deal? Well, I haven’t seen any financials, so I can’t know for sure. But that doesn’t mean we can’t speculate.

Online Data Backup is a booming field, and a necessary service. That’s why we exist - because we think we can provide a higher level of service than any of our competitors in this field. However, we’re still in middle of Web 2.0-mania. VC’s are throwing money every which way so they can quickly flip a company to a larger entity such as Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, or News Corp and come out way ahead. Do I think EVault is only 1/9 as valuable as Youtube? No, even with only 8500 customers, the have a specific business model, a growth market, and a track record of proven success. Youtube has some really funny videos, but they still need to figure out how to monetize it. I’d love for them to have a blog so we could get an inside look at what’s going on in their heads.

Enjoy the reading, and if you come across any other news that we miss, don’t hesitate to send them our way.

Technorati Tags: online data backup, blogs, data backup blog, evault

Our friends over at Telehouse often host conferences, and we attended one this morning. The end-goal of the conference is to learn how media is changing, and how this is going to affect us in the technology sector, and ultimately all of us.

The first speaker was Co-founder of Limelight Networks, Michael Gordon. With all due respect to all our partners in the technology sector, it is not often we find some as well-spoken and capable of holding a crowd’s interest as Michael Gordon.

Michael begins with a simple question: Did Google pay too much for Youtube? I was one of the few who actually said they did, but that’s because have more than a few friends who practice Intellectual Property law. Let’s just say they’re extremely successful because of the kind of suits that await Google & Youtube.

At Limelight, they don’t think so. In fact, Michael believes they under-paid. Why? Ultimately, he thinks it’s a fundamental change in the way media is delivered. I couldn’t agree more on this point. He gives two specific reasons: massive amounts of content online, and users accessing this content from here. His first example is from the legacy of music hitting the internet; in 2003, 1% of music sales were done online. In 2006, it was 10%. With the astounding success of Apple, iTunes, and the iPod, it’s hard to see this will do anything but grow.

Next, consider this: 10% of original xboxes attached Internet. Now with the Xbox360, 60% percent attached to internet. In May of 2006 NBC test launched online streaming video of one of their TV shows: 11 million streamed online. A couple of months later, ABC did the same, with 20 million delivered online in first two weeks. What’s also interesting is that broadcast viewership goes up (not down) when content is delivered online.

Technorati Tags: telehouse, limelight, youtube, media, online data backup

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Happy December! Besides the beginning of the mad rush for Holiday shopping, the lighting of the tree at Rockefeller Center, and attending multiple holiday parties, this month is special for yet another reason: the new changes in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

We first blogged about this development a number of months back, especially in this post. It’s something we’re keeping our clients abreast of. It’s a big change, and although today is the first effective date, we’ll certainly feel the ramifications for a long time to come.

A good friend of ours over at Telehouse International sent us a link to a great article this morning on Foxnews.com. The article, “New Rules Make Firms Track E-mails, Instant Messages for Federal Trials,” gives a good, quick overview of why these changes are so important for every business.

Under the new rules, an information technology employee who routinely copies over a backup computer tape could be committing the equivalent of “virtual shredding,” said Alvin F. Lindsay, a partner at Hogan & Hartson LLP and expert on technology and litigation.

Destroying evidence is pretty serious, and is certainly something I would never want to be accused of. We always practice what we preach: we use our own online backup solution of every computer, laptop, and server we use for our business. This way we always know we’d be prepared for any kind of electronic discovery.

These changes are going to be a burden for a number of companies, especially as their applicable scope is virtually unlimited. With under-staffed or overworked IT Departments, backup policies are often the first items to suffer from neglect. Regardless, we see these changes as a potentially positive development. No business should risk everything they have with easily corruptible and often incomplete backup policies. It’s our same mantra: make it automatic, and make it disk-to-disk.

We’ll keep our eyes and ears to the ground over the next couple of weeks to keep you all informed of any new developments. In the meantime, go backup your files!

Technorati Tags: federal rules civil procedure, online data backup, email, document retention, e-discovery