Symform New Fee Pricing

Symform, Inc. announced the Corporate Pricing Program.

The pricing includes unlimited online data storage in the Symform Storage Cloud at a flat fee. The new pricing coupled with the storage architecture from Symform is altering cloud storage by offering safe and reliable storage at a price other vendors can’t match.

Though it’s unusual to announce pricing clarity for storage solutions, Symform is making this bold move because the current cloud storage model is broken and expensive. Symform’s Resilient Storage Architecture – where all data is encrypted, shredded and redundantly geo-spread-is changing the way data is stored in the cloud. Companies of all sizes can now benefit from security, availability, durability, speed, and prices offered by the service.

The centralized cloud storage approach is unsustainable due to a rapid growth in data and a pricing model that increases costs as more data is protected. In most cloud storage scenarios, companies are charged for expensive and inefficient data center costs of a centralized platform – the cost to build a datacenter, the power and cooling expenses, and the vulnerabilities of fire, natural disasters and security breaches by a disgruntled employees.

What organizations don’t realize is that 85 percent of datacenter capacity sits idling and 50 percent of power is wasted. This is expensive and costs are passed on to customers. To keep storage projects under budget, CIOs currently have to choose what machines or data to backup, leaving a number of them vulnerable should something happen. This system gets complicated quickly.

Symform’s Resilient Storage Architecture ensures that customers’ data is more secure and reliable than with a traditional centralized datacenter model. By decentralizing cloud storage, the Symform Storage Cloud brings commodity prices to cloud storage by using underutilized storage resources already owned by the business.

The Symform pricing model, introduces a cost structure that, in many cases, is two to even ten times cheaper than its competitors, particularly when a business utilizes large amounts of data, servers or locations. For example:

 *estimates based on published pricing as of Feb 21, 2011
  assuming PCs storing 100 GB and servers storing 1 TB.

"The traditional cloud storage model is broken because companies are spending more money every time they need additional storage, when they already have resources in place to back up and protect the data," said Praerit Garg, President and Co-Founder of Symform. "It shouldn’t cost $12,000 or more a year to store two terabytes in the cloud when you can buy a two terabyte drive for $80. Symform is revolutionizing cloud storage by providing all the benefits of the cloud at local storage pricing-and we guarantee it."

Symform’s flat fee Corporate Pricing Program:

• Guarantees cloud storage is a savings of at least 50 percent or more annually for companies storing data in the cloud under the current model. This price advantage increases as a company’s storage needs grow.
• For businesses with large amounts of data, servers or locations, Symform can be up to ten times cheaper than its competitors because it puts a business’ unused storage resources to work across the extended enterprise.
• All corporate laptops and desktops are included in this price so CIOs don’t have budgets driving the choice of devices and data to protect.

"I talked about the value of a decentralized architecture nearly ten years ago," said Mike Karp, Vice President and Principal Analyst, Ptak, Noel & Associates. "Symform’s approach is innovative and smart. It provides distributed storage at a very aggressive price point while at the same time making it possible for both IT shops and individual users to get maximum value from existing but unused storage assets. This is, in a very real sense, the first instance of a worldwide utility model."

Symform also offers financial incentives for its reseller program and partners working with medium and large companies by offering a discount off the published pricing.

"Most offsite storage products charge 30 cents a gig," said Kevin Gibson, Vice President, Atlanta Technology Force. "For a typical customer with 900 gigabytes of data, that’s $270 a month. With Symform, on the other hand, ATF pays a flat fee that is about ten times cheaper no matter how much data we store. That’s a huge difference."