Bruce Talley is a co-founder of NAKIVO and its CEO. He has been in the virtualization and data protection industry for almost 10 years, and held the position of CEO at other companies before NAKIVO. Bruce is very passionate about his mission at NAKIVO and will be sharing more details with us in this interview.
What is NAKIVO?
NAKIVO is a US-based software vendor offering a high-class yet cost-effective solution for protecting data in virtual, physical and cloud environments. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, organizations of any size can protect their data. When founded in 2012, our company was focused on backup and replication for VMware-based infrastructures. Today, almost 8 years later, the capabilities of our solution have greatly expanded to cover VMware, AWS EC2, Nutanix AHV, Hyper-V environments, Windows and Linux-based physical servers, as well as Windows workstations. Since the beginning of 2019, we have released 6 versions of NAKIVO Backup & Replication, and we are shortly announcing our v9.3 release. All our efforts are now focused on helping our customers solve the widest possible range of data protection challenges and we are looking forward to hearing their feedback.
Could you give us a walkthrough of NAKIVO’s ecosystem and the solutions you provide?
NAKIVO Backup & Replication offers an all-in-one data protection platform for SMBs and large enterprises, and is designed to fit into basically any environment. The needs of our customers are constantly growing and they vary significantly. This inspires the NAKIVO team to continue to make our solution even more flexible to meet the expectations of customers. We have a broad ecosystem of partners that opens new integration opportunities to our customers. It is possible to install our software on a NAS device, thus creating a powerful yet cost-efficient backup appliance. These devices include QNAP, Synology, ASUSTOR, Western Digital, among others. Additionally, our product’s functionality can be combined with the capabilities of Dell EMC storage devices to increase backup speed and save storage space. NAKIVO Backup & Replication can also be combined with NEC HYDRAstor to decrease the size of backup data by up to 95%. There are many more combination options, and I hope that we will be able to offer new ones in the future.
You provide virtualized machines to Amazon cloud; tell us more about this and how it works?
Not only Amazon cloud. In fact, our product is integrated with the Azure cloud as well. With the functionality of NAKIVO Backup & Replication, our customers can use either cloud as a destination for their backup copies. It also includes a suite of features that allows them to reduce the size of backup data, which in turn saves storage space and network resources. Recovery activities are supported too, of course. It is possible to recover VMs, files and application objects directly from backups and backup copies stored in the cloud. Currently, this functionality covers VMware, Hyper-V and Nutanix AHV VMs, EC2 instances, as well as Linux and Windows-based physical servers. We are currently working on enabling direct backups to AWS S3 in the near future. This will help us take the user experience to a whole new level, and I personally can’t wait to receive feedback about it.
NAKIVO devises a range of DRaaS and on-premise solutions for organizations of all sizes. Tell us more about this?
Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service has long been seen as an alternative to the traditional disaster recovery strategy. This approach is a good way to cut costs by eliminating the need to invest in physical infrastructure and associated maintenance. The same can be said of Backup-as-a-Service and Recovery-as-a-Service. Today, about 300 providers of hosting, managed and cloud services are using NAKIVO Backup & Replication to deliver DRaaS, BaaS and RaaS to their customers. This is made possible by the multi-tenant functionality of NAKIVO Backup & Replication. It allows users to create and manage up to 1,000 isolated tenants within a single copy of our product. Multi-tenancy is also useful for organizations with large IT infrastructures. For these organizations, tenants can represent branch offices, departments, customers and other business units.
NAKIVO is a winner of the “Best of VMworld 2018” Gold Award for Data Protection. What does this mean for the company?
This is a great honor, of course. There were more than 80 nominees in 7 categories, each representing a particular area of the virtualization industry. NAKIVO received the Gold Award in the Data Protection category. During the event, we announced our new release, the v8.0 version offering Site Recovery. Even today, the disaster recovery functionality remains one of our key focus areas. VMworld 2018 was an excellent opportunity for us to present our new features to the community and draw the attention of hundreds of visitors. Overall, all VMworld conferences have been great and productive for the NAKIVO team and we are looking forward to attending upcoming ones.
NAKIVO is a US-based corporation, could you tell us more about your operations in the US and the global market?
NAKIVO is present worldwide, mainly in the United States, Europe and Asia. We have over 4,000 channel partners in more than 140 countries. Over 14,000 companies from a broad range of industries trust our data protection solution and we are proud to see this number continue to grow. We hope that our extensive feature set will help us increase our presence in the United States, in particular. Actually, one of our latest releases, the 9.2 version, allows our customers to easily yet effectively back up their Office 365 workloads, which is in high demand in the US market. Another newly-added feature supports backups of Windows, Linux physical servers and Windows Workstations. Put differently, we are developing NAKIVO Backup & Replication in a way to match the needs of our customers, while still searching for new ways to improve our product.
NAKIVO has great online community reviews and more than 14,000 paid customers worldwide. Who are your major customers and what makes you the best?
The NAKIVO team always offers an individual approach to each of our customers. Our customers include world renowned giants such as Honda, Coca-Cola, Fujifilm, Verifone, and many others. We have quite a large list of success stories showcasing our readiness to help our customers identify their data protection needs and adjust our solution to better meet them. One of the latest examples is GCA Telecom, a telecommunication service provider from El Salvador. We helped the company reduce the number of physical servers from ten to three, which in turn allowed them to save space and reduce the required maintenance efforts. I believe that flexibility and our personalized approach are among our strengths.
Could you tell us about your team and customer support?
NAKIVO is not a large company, we have about 120 employees in our team. However, I am proud to say that the level of customer satisfaction with our support service is as high as 97%. Our support engineers are standing by to assist in the Unites States, Europe and Asia, both via email and by phone. What’s more, we have recently added the 24/7 support and are now able to deliver assistance to our customers with nearly no delay.
Do you have more information for our readers?
I am often asked in what way NAKIVO Backup & Replication differs from its competition. I believe that our solution is different in terms of affordability and flexibility. Our product’s functionality allows for automation and orchestration of disaster recovery activities, and makes for a much more affordable solution compared to software designed specifically for disaster recovery purposes. We offer several pricing models, with per-socket licensing and per-machine subscription. The backup and recovery feature for Microsoft Office 365 is licensed per user. This allows our customers to pay only for what they need. Such an approach, I believe, is what makes our company stand out on the market and we are going to stick with it in the future. The ultimate mission of NAKIVO is to give our customers the ability to run, manage, automate and optimize their data protection and recovery activities, while still keeping the entire process simple, flexible and resource-efficient.
For more information, please visit www.nakivo.com
