Start-Up's Profile: ExEasy NetCDP

Location
Headquarters in Fremont, CA, with development offices in China and Colorado

Origin
Founded by a group of angel investors, NetCDP online backup was a part of a larger project. Alex Wang, one of the angel investors, took over NetCDP online backup as president after the company failed to secure VC fund due to the challenging economy condition and decided to restart ExEasy NetCDP in a scaled down model as a software vendor to develop and offer online/network backup solutions. Instead of running its own data centers to provide its own cloud storage, he changed the company direction and decided it was better to take advantage of cloud storage vendors’s existing infrastructures to offer NetCDP online backup as a front end software application to cloud storage companies such as Amazon S3, Rackspace, etc., and give users option to backup to their local networked storage such as NAS servers or home NAS appliance.

Main executives

Alex Wang, President: a software veteran with background in consumer
software and storage software technologies, he was one of core
development team members at Starfish Software founded by industry
legend Philip Kahn, which was acquired by Motorola in 1998; he also
worked at Brocade in the SAN management group.
Brian Wang, Chief Architect: with experience in file system and storage
system software application development, he worked with Alex Wang at
Starfish Software in the core development team; he was the architect
and lead developer of Copan Systems’s Millenia Archive software which
powers the 200A and 300A File Archiver for archival of persistent data
files built on Copan’s MAID technologies.

Number of employees
9

Revenues
NetCDP Online Backup was first launched in September 2009 for public download, attracting thousands of individual and small business users, being used for free with full restoration disabled on complete loss of local data. NetCDP’s revenue is marginal at the moment and the goal is to build a much larger user base of millions of users and to be profitable by 2011.

Technology
NetCDP is an online backup software application for consumers and businesses that compresses, encrypts and stores digital assets such as photos, videos, music, e-mails and other files. Some key features and technology involved:

Automatic and continuous data backup: files are backed up as soon as a change is detected; backup being incremental, only new and changed files are backed up
Drag/drop, copy/paste or one click restores
File de-duplication: files with same content are backed up only once to save storage space
Files are compressed on the fly before they go on wire to save bandwidth
Secured data transfer: 448-bit encryption
End to end data integrity check for both backup and restoration to make sure files are not corrupted
Configurable and unlimited file versions: files will not be deleted from backup even if they are deleted from local computers
Periodical backup of open and locked files such as outlook .pst files, optionally specify dynamic (frequently changing) files
Intelligent file filtering: exclude files by extensions and specify dynamic files
Multi-computer backup: back up as many computers to a single cloud storage account or NAS account

NetCDP allows to store an unlimited amount of compressed data for 15 cents per gigabyte on S3 online storage without monthly subscription and startup fee, or to a network share within local network for better performance. It can achieve 60-90% of compression ratio with uncompressed files and backup an entire PC with less than $5 a month to S3, according to the company.

There is a free version of NetCDP with limited features and another one at $29 per license key.

Distributors and OEMs
ExEasy NetCDP is distributed by CNet’s download.com and other software download site such as brothersoft.com. The firm is currently developing its channel and OEM strategy to bundle NetCDP with cloud or NAS storage from other storage vendors. It is working with another startup called TFStor to integrate NetCDP with TFStor’s multi-tier, multi-device network file system to provide complete backup and archive solutions to enterprise customers.

Number of customers
NetCDP has attracted thousands of individual users and dozens of business customers since it was launched more than two months ago.

Competitors
Software vendors such as Jungle Disk and Symantec

Roadmap
NetCDP currently supports S3 and NAS as storage targets and then Rackspace, Microsoft Azure, etc.