We intend to work closely with system integrators in India

As one of the few open source companies in the backup domain, how does

Zmanda face competition from the likes of Veritas?



While we face competition from vendors like Veritas (part of Symantec) and

Legato (part of EMC), our real competition comes from home grown scripts. Our

target customer base simply cannot afford complexity and huge cost of companies

like Veritas. In the past, their solution has been to roll up their own backup

solution. However, these solutions are very hard to maintain and scale. It is

here that we provide a great alternative: a simple to manage, and well

supported, backup solution at a tenth of the cost of Veritas.

What is your take on Microsoft jumping in the Open source domain?



Open source is a key part of todays IT infrastructure and Microsoft is a

key IT player. They dont have a choice but to figure out how best to coexist

with open source. Being able to closely integrate with Windows-based

infrastructure would be a major step forward for open source projects as well. I

am hopeful that Microsoft will live up to the spirit of its recent announcements

and truly work with the open source community on interoperability and open

standards. It will be a win-win situation. But what is important to note is that

not only does our backup solutions protect open source operating systems like

Linux and Open Solaris, but also operating systems from Microsoft.

Chander Kant, CEO, Zmanda

What is your business model considering that you are an open source backup

company?



Our business model is very similar to that of Red Hat and MySQL. We have a

freely downloadable community edition. Thousands of users download and use our

community editions every month. Some of these users look for 24x7 technical

support as well as proactive access to security patches. These users buy an

annual subscription to our enterprise editions. Our enterprise edition customers

reap excellent value out of their subscriptions because, not only do they

directly benefit from support provided by Zmanda engineers, they also reap the

benefits of years of testing and feedback provided by users of our community

editions.

Stuti Das



stutid@cybermedia.co.in