As many of you already know, in June we welcomed Matthew J. Schiltz as CEO of Symform. Matt is a proven veteran of the Seattle tech scene, having served in executive roles at some of the most successful Seattle tech growth companies over the past 20 years. In this Q&A, we wanted to give our Symform community the chance to get to know Matt on a deeper level, and provide insight into Matt’s vision and priorities for Symform.

Why Symform?
I have a true passion for transforming traditional, mature, IT technology segments by building leading growth companies that are delivering a new paradigm and unlocking dramatically better value for the customer. We all know that the Data Storage market is in desperate need of a fundamentally better solution. The moment I was introduced to Symform, I was absolutely intrigued. Symform is on a high order mission: build a massive global peer-to-peer storage and backup network that leapfrogs traditional offsite storage and unlocks tremendous value for customers by supplying superior security, performance, and revolutionary cost savings. I have witnessed firsthand the explosive growth of data globally; I firmly believe that this decentralized network must be built. For me, these are the types of companies I like to pursue. Symform is a company with a very bright future, because we are successfully challenging and disrupting the current models for the better good. Read more »

Disaster Recovery (DR) is always positioned as an enterprise initiative that involves massive investment in technology, business processes and implementation.  But there are many pieces to a DR plan, and at the end of the day, the most vital is making sure you have the data you need to keep your business going.

For many small businesses, a DR event can be as simple as when “Oops I deleted my file” becomes “Oh my gosh, my data is gone”.

To put numbers behind this, the U.S. Bureau of Labor has a startling statistic:  70% of small businesses close within one year of a catastrophic loss of data.  In its DR section, Wikipedia states that 43% of all companies never re-open after a major loss of business data.

For many of those businesses, if they had saved their data somewhere safe, and made sure their employees could access that data, they could have re-opened quickly, operating out of home offices and hotel rooms.  But to lose everything:  customer accounts, billing data, order information, and even emails and software programs – makes rebooting your business a long, complex and expensive endeavor, which is why so many don’t ever recover.

In spite of this statistic, most small companies still do the minimum required to back up their data. According to IDC research, 60% of SMBs do only local (onsite) backup, while 15% do no back up at all.  10% leverage online backup for at least the first level of backup.

Tim Clark, a partner at the FactPoint Group, just wrote a whitepaper on “Best Practices in Backup Disaster Recovery for SMBs”.  In this paper, Tim advises that all companies, no matter what size, need to look beyond single-tier onsite backup to secondary, DR backup that includes an online (cloud) backup component.

Why more SMBs have not turned to cloud-based backup and DR services is probably due to the cost.  Buying a simple backup hard-drive is about a hundred bucks (for 2TB or more!) but the same amount of online storage can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars.  That is changing, and SMBs can look to newer models of cloud storage and start doing DR like the big boys, only much cheaper!

A recent story on MarketPlace from American Public Media really got our attention. In the story, The high cost of cloud computing, they discuss how data center-based services require an immense amount of electricity to operate: 2 percent of all the electricity used in the U.S. But what really stood out was the very end of the story:

But Christian Belady at Microsoft wants to evolve even further. His goal?

BELADY: How do we make the data center disappear?

One way could be to build data servers right into our gadgets and laptops and other systems, and spread out the energy cost. He says it’s coming.

It’s actually already here. Symform does this for cloud storage by aggregating unused disk space and bandwidth from computers all around the world to create a secure, reliable global storage cloud. This revolutionary approach allows businesses to get more use out of the hardware they have already purchased and the electricity powering that hardware.

Another great Symform partner was profiled in the most recent issue of ChannelPro magazine. Amy Babinchak with Harbor Computer Services discusses the challenges she used to face with protecting client data and how Symform worked with her to solve those problems. Read the full article to learn more about her business and Symform’s superior approach to offsite data protection.

Our new Corporate Pricing Program that was announced today is getting some buzz! From Channelnomics:

The new Symform pricing scheme guarantees predictable storage fees that are guaranteed to be at least 50 percent less than competitors

And our Partners are excited to have predictable cloud storage pricing that makes it easier to sell secure offsite data protection to their clients. “Most offsite storage products charge 30 cents a gig,” said Symform Partner Kevin Gibson with Atlanta Technology Force. “For a typical customer with 900 gigabytes of data, that’s $270 a month. With Symform, on the other hand, ATF pays a flat fee that is about ten times cheaper no matter how much data we store. That’s a huge difference.” (Read the full case study.)

Visit our pricing page to see how much you can save with Symform.

Symform Partner Jeremy Treister, President of CMIT Solutions of Chicago Downtown, was profiled in the new issue of ChannelPro magazine. Read the full article to learn about Treister’s business, their remote backup challenge and how Symform provided a superior solution.

We are proud to announce that CRN recently named Symform one of the Top 20 Cloud Storage Vendors of 2011. From their release:

Symform’s Storage Cloud combines the best practices of disaster recovery, data security and distributed networking leveraging the Web. And Symform promises to do it 10 times cheaper and 10 times faster than its rival online storage services.

Praerit Garg, President and Co-Founder of Symform and Bassam Tabbara, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of Symform were recently included on CRN’s list of the 25 Most Innovative Executives of 2010. Exciting!

One of the most common questions we get when introducing people to the Symform Cooperative Storage Cloud is “if you rely on random computers worldwide, how is the data kept secure and always available?” Our short answer is that we assume Symform nodes will be unreliable so we encrypt the data at source, shred it into small fragments, add a hefty layer of redundancy using a RAID algorithm and then spread it to many random nodes throughout the world. This combination of encryption and redundant distribution makes Symform more secure than any data center.

Our short answer satisfies most people; however, those who are very technically minded (or simply into the details of how things work) might want a little more information. To satisfy the concerned and the curious we’ve created a new page called “How Symform Processes and Stores Data”, which will hopefully be enough information about our data security processes for even the most techie folks out there.

Of course, if you still want more information you can always contact us and we’ll be happy to talk tech.

A little over a year ago we made history when we launched the world’s first Cooperative Storage Cloud^TM – a revolutionary idea that enabled businesses to trade inexpensive local disk space for valuable cloud storage. Unfortunately, bandwidth availability constraints prevent some SMBs from fully participating in the Symform solution.

Today we are correcting that problem (and making history again in the process) with the introduction of The Symform Storage Exchange^TM. From the press release:

Starting immediately, Symform is enabling its reseller Partners to sell their excess local storage to those customers who are unable to contribute. Partners, in effect, become “micro data centers” that are distributed around the world.  The storage trading isn’t done directly; instead one side is selling excess storage to the Symform cloud while the other is purchasing it as needed.

As you might imagine we are pretty excited about this. In the past we have had turn away some great potential Partners because their clients lacked the bandwidth capacity to provide the necessary contribution back to the Cooperative. Now those locations will be able to participate and receive secure online storage that is still significantly less expensive than any data center-based provider.

At the same time, Symform Partners who have excess available bandwidth and storage capacity will be able to monetize those investments.

Active Symform Partners interested in selling contribution storage to Symform can apply on the Symform Partner Dashboard.

MSPs who are not yet Symform Partners can register today to become a Partner. Once approved new Partners can participate as storage buyers or apply to become storage sellers.

Read the full press release (PDF).