Our Journey to the Enterprise

When Backupify began in 2009, our mission was to back up social data for consumers in the cloud.  Over the past 4 years, social sites such as Twitter and Facebook have become extremely popular and as consumers we’re now accustomed to web-based services.  We live our lives in the cloud and we don’t think much about it.

The enterprise has followed a similar trajectory. According to Gartner, global spending for the Software as a Service (SaaS) market is forecast to grow to $32.8B in 2016 (up from $13.5B in 2011) and global spending for public cloud services is expected to grow from $76.9B in 2010 to $210B in 2016. Our early success in the consumer market led to inquiries from businesses, which led to the launch of our Google Apps backup business product in early 2010.

As cloud adoption across enterprises increases, so does the demand for a secure, reliable cloud backup solution.  That is why our business products have gone from a small percentage of our revenue 3 years ago to over 90% of our revenue today.  For that reason, we recently decided to begin phasing out our consumer backup solutions in order to focus 100 percent on serving the B2B market for cloud-to-cloud backup.

We’ve experienced significant growth in the B2B space and want to remain focused on providing the type of continuous innovation and proactive support that our customers have come to expect from us. Below are more details on how this will impact customers.

• There is no immediate impact to our current customers – we will continue to service and support all of our personal backup products for the foreseeable future;
• As we begin phasing out our consumer services over the next few months, we will provide a clear and easy path for customers to export their existing data and move their backup service to a comparable offering;
• We have no plans to discontinue our backup service for Facebook Fan Pages, Twitter or personal Gmail accounts;
• We will begin limiting new sign ups for the following personal services right away and will look to discontinue these products by the end of this year: Facebook personal profiles, Blogger, Picassa, Flickr.

Over the next several months, Backupify will provide customers with detailed information on how they can retrieve their data. Additionally, we will suggest alternative solution providers where customers can go to continue to backup their personal data, including SocialSafe, a product that pulls your data down to a local device. Now that there are many other options to protect personal cloud data and our customers will be in good hands, we feel like the time is right for us to focus on what we do best.

Startups are filled with many difficult decisions. This particular decision was debated for close to two years and in the end we feel strongly that we’re taking the business in the right direction and will be better positioned to serve and support our B2B customers.

If you have questions or comments, please reach out by emailing
[email protected]