Asigra Adds Execs, Takes Aim at Bigger Customers

Data backup and recovery software maker Asigra wants a piece of the enterprise action, and the company's added a troop of new executives to get the job done.

In a hiring spree, Asigra has added the following members to its management team:

"The new team has a lot more experience selling through multiple channels to large organizations," says EVP Eran Farajun. Asigra, founded in 1986, has done well selling to service providers who in turn serve SMBs, he says. But the company feels underexposed to large corporations, where Asigra's agentless software is a contender for remote-site backup and recovery against EMC's Avamar appliance and Symantec's PureDisk software, as well as Iron Mountain's LiveVault, and Seagate's EVault services.

At least one analyst thinks well of Asigra's new campaign. "They've had a lot of success in SMBs via managed service providers. Now they're realizing they need to put more marketing effort in the area of larger customers," says Jerome Wendt, president of consulting firm DCIG. In his view, Asigra should be able to gain more penetration in big companies looking to apply the vendor's agentless software to multiple remote sites via LAN-attached servers.

"EMC and Symantec are still trying to figure out what they've got and how to position it," he says. "Asigra's product is more mature... They've got a hard combination to beat right now."That said, the competition isn't waiting on Asigra to move ahead. EMC claims over 1,000 customers for Avamar, helped by integration with VMware, EMC NetWorker, EMC Backup Advisor, and EMC Celerra. And EMC says it's sold more than 2,000 nodes of Avamar Data Store, a package including Avamar's software on a preconfigured EMC-certified appliance.

Asigra, which still has fewer than 75 employees, "runs into Avamar all the time," Farajun concedes, explaining that part of the momentum for adding the new managers is to address growing momentum among top storage suppliers who are breaking into service provisioning.

Today, Asigra claims over 300 service providers who sell Asigra's Televaulting software in turn to "thousands" of SMBs. By throwing more resources at the enterprise space, the company hopes to expand that figure signficantly.

One set of prospects will include outsourcers interested in using Televaulting as a SaaS (software-as-a-service) platform. "Asigra addresses the efficiencies in backup and recovery that outsourcers require," says Joseph Jeter, the new chief sales officer.

Asigra is also planning a new version of its software for release later this spring.Asigra's managers claim they're not replacing anyone. "The new hires were all additions," says Farajun.

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