VMblog:  With Vembu BDR Suite, what was your goal behind the product? 

Nagarajan:  Vembu has been in the industry since 2002. We were providing Backup and DR software exclusively for service providers. Since then, we have delivered tangible value to more than 60,000 small & mid businesses worldwide through a network of 4000+ partners.

A few years later we observed a void in the market for an affordable product with enterprise-level features. Vembu's goal is to make backup & disaster recovery software easily affordable for hundreds of thousands of small & medium businesses worldwide.

Hence, we came up with Vembu's flagship offering in 2014, Vembu BDR Suite - A comprehensive backup and disaster recovery solution for diverse IT environments including virtual, physical, applications and endpoints for businesses of any size and type.

VMblog:  How do your company and product fit within the VMware ecosystem? 

Nagarajan:  Vembu has been an elite partner of VMware, leveraging the latest technologies of VMware to provide enterprise-level Backup, DR & Replication functionalities for the VMware VMs at an affordable price point.

Using Vembu, organizations can effectively meet the VMware backup demands and experience an intuitive, agentless, image-level backup that not only protects business-critical virtual machines but also applications and application data.

Vembu supports CBT enabled incremental data transfer using VMware VADP and Hot-Add & SAN transport modes for LAN free data transfer.

Vembu offers instant recovery options and failover & failback capabilities to have your VMs up and running within a few minutes at the time of system crash or disaster. It also enables businesses to leverage on cloud & offsite storage to effectively implement a 3-2-1 backup strategy.

VMblog:  Being a consistent participant to VMworld, how has the response for Vembu changed over the years?

Nagarajan:  The biggest challenge which we faced in our product's initial stages was brand awareness. Vembu BDR Suite, in spite of its affordability and ease of use, faced the initial struggle due to the lack of our brand's popularity.

VMworld gave us the platform to showcase our product in front of a larger crowd and was instrumental in helping us create our brand's identity amongst the community. It paved our way to connect with experts all across the globe and to offer them what we have in store.

Our first VMworld event was back in 2014. We have been regular since then because it helps us get quality feedback about our product from the virtualization community.

Being at VMworld is like a union with the tech community. This is a one-stop destination to learn upcoming trends, meet enthusiasts of varied background & requirements.

We visit VMworld not only for business purposes but also to help us understand the ever-changing customer requirements to bridge the gap between demand and available solution.

VMblog:  How has your market share increased over the years?  How has VMworld helped you in enabling the networking options with the community?  Do you have any other plans to reach out to the community apart from VMworld & other VMUG events? 

Nagarajan:  VMworld laid us the foundation to be recognized as one of the key players in the backup and DR industry. vExperts and tech enthusiasts who acknowledge Vembu BDR Suite for the enterprise-class features and its affordable pricing point, recommend our product to those in need. VMworld helped us with this much-needed word-of-mouth review and user recommendations from experts and techies across the globe.

VMworld has helped us garner the attention of the industry people and has given us a brand identity which is reflecting in our sales. We have been having exponentially growing conversion ratio and our every year sales are breaking the previous year's record.

Regarding other opportunities to reach out to the community - Yes, we have plans for this year. We are hosting an exclusive Vembu Roadshow across the USA. We have chosen different cities, each city a month to meet the backup enthusiasts and tech experts from that particular region, discuss ideas and collaborate with them to make our product available in every nook and corner of the World.

VMblog:  Can you give readers a few reasons why your product or service is considered unique?

Nagarajan:  Absolutely!

Vembu BDR Suite is an all-in-one solution that addresses the Backup, Replication and DR needs of your diverse IT environment such as Virtual, Physical, Cloud.

Industry best RPO & RTO of less than 15 minutes for seamless backups & faster recoveries.

Quick VM Recovery allows you to boot your image-based backup data instantly across any hypervisors of your choice.

Vembu's own patented file system - Vembu Hive helps to efficiently manage the backup storages with built-in functionalities such as Compression, Encryption, Deduplication.

Hybrid cloud deployment of Vembu allows having a secondary copy of backup data in a highly secured Vembu Cloud, deployed in AWS.

Vembu Universal Explorer is a free tool from Vembu, allow you to instantly and granularly recover the application item from the backup data without restoring the entire backup data.

With Vembu, you can simply perform P2V, V2V, P2P migration

VMblog:  Can you give a brief note about your pricing structure?  Are you having any offers right now?

Nagarajan:  Offers tend to be intermediate. So, we are not big fans of running offers. Instead, we have a structured pricing plan which will make anyone with even the slightest purchase interest, immediately grab the license.

To explain in detail, we have different license models, pricing models & editions to cater to different requirements.

Vembu offers CPU socket based pricing and VM level pricing for VMware environment and the license can be purchased either in subscription or perpetual model. You can opt for any one of these models based on your requirements.

We have different editions - Free, Standard and Enterprise, based on the level of functionality you need for your environment and the size of your business.

I.e: Vembu BDR Suite is a full-featured edition for large environments that comes at the most competitive pricing range in the SMB market.

Vembu BDR Essentials (for businesses up to 10 CPU sockets/100 VMs) is for a section of users who require more features other than those offered in the free edition but couldn't stretch more in terms of pricing.

It was originally launched for businesses up to 6 CPU Sockets/50 VMs, which is the standard industry size for small businesses. After a series of surveys, we found the growth rate and opportunities available for small businesses. Hence, we extended the package limit to 10 CPU sockets/100 VMs as we wanted to empower the small businesses further to help them achieve their goals.

Vembu BDR Suite - Free edition caters to those users who value their data but are not in a position to shell out money

We have delivered the best in class solution for businesses of all sizes and we are immensely delighted to know that we have been able to empower so many businesses who couldn't spend a fortune for protecting their business-critical data.

VMblog:  Why should VMworld attendees add you to their MUST SEE list?

Nagarajan:  Data protection has become a significant factor today and the necessity of finding the right solution for one's requirements has scaled higher. Hence, it's the responsibility of the vendors to make the product available to all. We, at Vembu, keep our customers first and always strive to stand ahead of time in terms of meeting their requirements.

Please meet us at VMworld and we will be glad to demonstrate to you about the backup architecture for your IT Environment or developing a BCDR plan.

VMblog:  Can you give VMblog readers a sneak peek as to what you will be showing off at your booth this year?  What can attendees expect to see and hear at your booth?

Nagarajan:  We have exciting pieces of information about our latest release of Vembu BDR Suite v4.0.1 to share with the VMware community. When you visit our booth you get more than just a quick demo of Vembu BDR Suite, you can see it in action.

With data threats becoming rampant, every business needs a data protection plan, and our experts can help you in saving your businesses' time and money through Vembu BDR Suite.

Also, our experts could suggest you the right ways to protect your data and could give you that one strategy that could potentially save your business. If you are planning a backup architecture for your IT Environment or developing a BCDR plan, you can also get suggestions for them.

If you are one among those who are looking for a cost-effective & modern data protection solution with enterprise-level functionality, you should drop by our Booth #1868 and get to know how Vembu BDR Suite meets your requirements and fits your budget.

You will also get to know the product roadmap and the features that are coming in upcoming releases of Vembu.

VMblog:  What are the consequent updates that you are planning to bring in Vembu BDR Suite?

Nagarajan:  We are partnering with leading storage vendors like NetApp, HPE, and IBM to offer storage level snapshot backups. We also look forward to working with other major storage vendors in the market to offer integration with their storage systems.

Our upcoming major release will bring the cloud replication feature to live, where you can spin your backed VMs as instances in AWS. This gives a huge scope to avoid downtime or data loss during a disaster.

Apart from that, Vembu is all set to provide support to protect cloud-native workloads which will help you perform Cloud-native agentless backup and recovery of AWS EC2 Instances. This feature ensures the protection of your AWS data against accidental deletion, security threats, and outages.

We have many more such interesting updates. It's going to be a crucial year for vembu with many upgrades and updates lined up ahead.

VMblog:  Finally, what would you say to prospective attendees who are thinking about attending VMworld but aren't sure if it's worth it or not?

Nagarajan:  To all prospective attendees, tech enthusiasts and users, this is the event to go for if you are the one looking to explore business possibilities and expand your technical horizon.