Analysis

posted on 03 July 2008 08:14

Two companies have come into view recently, offering 'white label' online backup and storage services to be badged and branded by their resellers, in this case ISPs and PC manufacturers. These are the retailers of the suppliers' wholesale service.

Steek is a French company, based in the Bordeaux wine region, and offering an online storage and backup service to ISPs and hardware manufacturers. Steek has 1.5 million users of its online backup and storage services with more than 15 ISP and OEM partnerships. Steek's direct customers are ISPs, portals, security software providers and storage hardware manufacturers, meaning notebook, PC, and, in the future, mobile device (phone) manufacturers.

The pitch to them all is that they can offer a service to their residential customers enabling them to backup, store and share their own content, so-called User Generated content (UGC) as part of their own service offering.

Said direct customer gets to offer the service quickly because the software and infrastructure technology comes from Steek in a 2-tier supply arrangement. It means the ISP, telco, and HW manufacturers can compete with Flickr, Mozy and the other international brands and encourage their own customers to be loyal and use added value - extra profit - services.

Steek is expanding into the USA and has built a WAshington, DC, data center.

Spare Backup is a US company and offers white label backup services to PC and note book manufacturers. Its biggest win is to get distribution on Sony's Vaio line. The company is developing an enterprise offering.

We are seeing the rapid development of a multi-pronged cloud storage and backup market:-

1. For consumers, SMEs and Enterprises from the likes of EMC's Mozy and Nirvanix, the developing global brands, with EVault and Carbonite alongside. National brands are developing as well, such as SquirrelSave.
2. For consumers from PC, notebook and mobile phone hardware suppliers, with Spare Backup and Steek as examples. A screen desktop real estate landgrab is under way.
3. For consumers from ISPs with Steek as an example. We might expect another strongly fought-over market as greenfield ISPs are courted by suppliers

It is early days and this multi-pronged build out will be followed by consolidation.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}