Start-Up’s Profile: Gladinet

Company:
Gladinet, Inc.

Location:
Headquarters in Lake Worth, FL with an office in Shanghai, China

Born in:
2008

Funding:
Currently self funded

Main executives:
A group of four leaders from Citrix and Lucent, including co-founders Jerry Huang (CEO) and Franklyn Peart

Number of employees:
20 (4 founders, 7 developers, 3 testers, support staff)

Technology:
Gladinet delivers cloud services to desktop and operating system with two products for SMBs, Cloud Desktop and Cloud Gateway.

 
Cloud Desktop, launched in Spring 2009, leverages the power of the Internet as a virtual PC, providing users a virtual disk drive and automating online backup with local files. It is a personal cloud agent, an open online backup platform, and a desktop delivery agent for cloud service providers. It lets users access cloud storage such as Amazon S3, EMC Atmos, Google Docs or AT&T’s Synoptic Storage as a Service as though it were a local HDD or NAS. They don’t need to manage numerous accounts and interfaces; instead, each can be mapped as a network drive directly accessible from Windows Explorer. The latest version of Cloud Desktop includes the new Gladinet Online service, which encrypts and stores user profiles online for easy access from multiple computers. A single-user license of Cloud Desktop Professional Edition Version 1.x costs $40 for home use and $60 for commercial use.

If Cloud Desktop turns the Internet into a virtual PC, Cloud Gateway, launched last October, is its file server. Built on the same open platform, it connects individual desktops to cloud storage through one access point. "Before, if a company had 100 employees using Cloud Desktop, they needed 100 connections to Amazon S3, Google Docs or whatever services their employees were using. With the Gateway, that’s all changed. Now SMBs only need Cloud Gateway to connect to cloud services, regardless of how many different interfaces or accounts they may have. The Gateway acts as a file server to the Desktops, which simply connect to it over their LAN," said Jerry Huang.

                      
Benefits of Cloud Gateway

Distribution:
Gladinet’s affiliates or resellers get a 30% bonus.

Roadmap:
A premium edition of  Cloud Desktop coming soon with more functionalities.

Number of customers:
200,000 downloads of Cloud Desktop

Market:
Cloud services and cloud storage