The Seattle Times
by Marisa Dorazio
December 15, 2003
What: UltraBac Software
Where: Based in Bellevue, with offices in Boston and the United Kingdom.
Who: Morgan Edwards, 56, chief executive officer
Two decades ago: Edwards and former business partner Martin Barratt founded the company in 1982 as Barratt Edwards International. "In the early days, we specialized in utility software for minicomputers," Edwards said.
Change in direction: The company was reinvented in 1995 by Edwards and new business partner Paul Bunn to create backup software.
Back to business: Specializing in the business market, UltraBac gets 60 percent of its sales from resellers; the rest comes from direct sales.
The mighty jungle: UltraBac is in the seventh version of its signature product, UltraBac 7.x. The program is a file-by-file backup and offered for individual workstations or for servers.
Common sense: While most companies keep backup data in the same housing as their regular systems, Edwards boasts that UltraBac's software can back up data to separate locations to avoid loss in case of fire or flooding.
A new market: Disaster recovery has become the new focus area. UltraBac offers UBDR (UltraBac Disaster Recover) Pro, designed to allow recovering data from an inoperable machine as quickly as possible. The company says the software can recover a 4.4 gigabyte operating-system partition in 15 minutes.
The pitch: It's like insurance: There is a significant trade-off in cost between the expense of installing a recovery solution and the cost resulting from inoperable computers during a disaster.
New release: The company plans to release UBDR Gold in January. It's similar to the Pro version but designed for a more sophisticated user and has more extended features.
The price: The software ranges from $145 for a single workstation backup to $1,095 for an Enterprise Edition containing backup for seven servers and unlimited workstations. UBDR Pro for one server, including image backups, is $695. UltraBac also offers bundles.
Jumping hurdles: The 35-employee company suffered a hard hit from the economic downturn but has managed to install software covering 60,000 seats, with a customer base of 4,000. A recent key sale was to American Family Insurance, which included 3,700 licenses.
International touch: While English-only versions of the products are being used in Europe, UltraBac also has a Japanese version.
"We're trying to develop Japan as a new market," said Edwards. The company sends its own business-development consultant to Japan every month to form relationships and jump-start business.
Click here to view article.
Marisa Dorazio: 206-464-2291 or
mdorazio@seattletimes.com
|
