Fresh from a new round of funding, Axcient is agressively recruiting partners and providing them with new enablement tools and support.

By Michael Siggins with Colleen Frye

Justin Moore is chief executive officer and co-founder of Axcient Inc., a data protection company in Mountain View, Calif., that offers backup, business continuity, and disaster recovery solutions for SMBs. He spoke with ChannelPro-SMB Publisher Michael Siggins about how Axcient plans to invest its latest round of venture funding.

ChannelPro-SMB: Axcient recently raised $15.5 million in a new round of funding. Tell me about your plans for the investment.

Moore: This is an industry that’s still dominated by legacy technology, and Axcient is on the forefront of disrupting that legacy approach to protecting SMBs and ensuring they stay up and running no matter what happens.

So we had a lot of outside interest in the company. We’re growing significantly, 30-plus percent quarter over quarter. We’re growing our channel, our customers. Our cloud is growing exponentially. We want to continue to accelerate our growth, and this capital will allow us to do a couple of things. One is it will allow us to continue to expand our platform. It’s also going to allow us to expand our operations and support teams, so that we can better support the channel. We want to enable the channel’s success on two fronts. One is marketing and sales enablement, and two is from the support side to make sure they’re fully supported at all times, so they can best service their SMB customers.

Then, of course, we have our eye on expansion internationally, so this funding is going to allow us to accelerate that plan—so really good things for the channel and really good things for SMBs, and of course, good for the company. Timing is right. Valuation is right. We’re very excited about the rounds.

ChannelPro-SMB: What sets Axcient apart from such a crowded marketplace?

Moore: It is a crowded space, but you’ve got to remember this is a space that is dominated by legacy backup solutions … which in the majority of cases is still coupled with tape. When it’s not coupled with tape, it’s coupled with network patch storage, and installing is one part of the problem, which is the data backup problem.

We say, look, it’s not just about protecting the data; it’s about protecting the applications. It’s about protecting the servers. It’s about protecting all of the devices on a network. We don’t just make sure you never lose data. We make sure you don’t go down, and that’s just as critical. Downtime equals lots of lost money and lost good will of customers. We make sure an SMB stays up and running, that they stay productive, and they’re able to service their customers. So that is, fundamentally, a very different approach that we’ve taken to solving their problem.

At the same time, for an SMB to replicate anything close to what Axcient does, it would have to work with three or four different vendors to cobble together a solution. Axcient simplifies that complexity. Instead of three or four vendors, you work with one. [We provide] a single platform that is Web-based, that doesn’t involve the installation of any software on the network, that offers not only complete backup, but just as importantly, total business continuity, total uptime, and total productivity.

Page 1 2 Next »