Wednesday, November 7th, 2007As pricing comes down for online data backup, adoption rates have risen. Mozy and Carbonite both offer unlimted storage for about $50/yr. That is a great rate! Mozy currently has about 350,000 customers, Carbonite over 100,000. The only downside is that data takes a long time to upload. As a second or third option it is hard to beat.
Hi, I’m Carbonite’s CEO, and thanks for the mention in your blog. It’s a pretty exciting time to be in this business. I would like to take issue with the statistics you cited, however. I think it would be more accurate to say that Mozy has 350,000 “users”, since “customer” implies that money has changed hands. I would bet that most of those users are using their 2GB-free-forever accounts. Carbonite doesn’t like that business model because the paying customers have to subsidize all the freeloaders. You can try Carbonite for 15 days, but then you have to pay. So our customers are really customers.
Regards,
David Friend
CEO, Carbonite Inc.
Carbonite Online Backup
I agree with David. Our research shows that except for a single large GE contract, most of Mozy’s “customers” are free users, and that only about 3% of those convert to paid accounts.
I’m Rob Cosgrove, CEO of Remote Backup Systems, Inc., developer of RBackup commercial Online Backup software used by many companies who provide online backup services.
I also agree with the author. Online backup IS seeing much higher adoption rates within the past year, growing by the month. Our service providers are upgrading their number of client licenses at historical levels, indicating that their businesses are seeing the same increase in numbers of customers.
Rob Cosgrove
Remote Backup Sytems, Inc.
http://remote-backup.com
The mozy (pre emc anyway) model was based on as Dave said, paying clients carrying freeloaders. Worse still is the idea off add revenue online backup. Users would rarely restore so the add revenue would be minimal. This leaves low revenue to fulfill backup comittments and support clients. The free lunch has arrived and its’ aweful. Online backup is like any other product. You get what you pay for. Be a customer, not a user. and you will benefit greatly from online backup.
Frank Moonet
http://www.backupanytime.com
