Committed to delivering Safe, Secure and Reliable Backup Solutions: Bacula Systems

“ Founded in 2008, Bacula Systems is a company that represents the disruptive force of open core in the industry, combined with the cutting edge technology, support and accountability expected from enterprise software vendors.”

The current market trend in IT infrastructure is to find high value solutions that bring about efficiency and reliability. For the majority of businesses, competition is fierce and as a result, data center costs need to be kept down. This sits well with Bacula Systems, because its solutions improve performance in the IT department, while driving data backup costs down for its customers.

Kern Sibbald launched the Bacula open source project in 2000 to answer the need for more stable and scalable backup technology. Since then, there have been over 3 million downloads of the Bacula community version. Led by Kern in 2008, Bacula Systems was formed in Switzerland in order to complement the open source project by providing support, training and advanced enterprise features in the form of Bacula Enterprise Edition to large data centers and MSP’s. Today, Bacula
Systems has high profile customers all over the world and in many different industries.

“Our approach is to provide exactly the technology that our customers are requesting. As a result, our technical development is largely customer-driven,” said Kern. “This means our technologies are modern, relevant, forward-thinking and market-fit for heavy-duty, real-world application,” he added.

Meeting Objectives with Unique Solutions
In the IT world of backup and data recovery, users need to be able to achieve diverse objectives such as policy compliancy, reduction of backup window time, faster data recovery, data deduplication targets, reduced data loss, or even detecting storage problems, such as Silent Data Corruption.Bacula Systems has unique technologies to meet these objectives on a grand scale. At the same time, the solution needs to be highly secure, easy to use, flexible and customizable. For example, one customer may demand a specific capability like Single File Restore from within virtual machines. Or perhaps to backup data to the Cloud. Others need the unique Late Data Inclusion technology, so that no last minute data is lost when a database backup is in process. All of this cutting-edge technology is used for backup and data recovery of both physical and virtual environments alike, enabling entire data centers to be fully protected from a single platform. That represents a huge benefit for them, before one even begins to count the benefit from cost reduction.

The Standout Factor
Three qualities make Bacula Systems standout in the market place. Firstly, the company’s product has the high scalability, performance and reliability needed for the most demanding enterprise or MSP, delivering advanced functionality and capability. Secondly, it enhances this with superior support, resulting in an almost 100 percent customer retention rate since the start of the company. Thirdly, Bacula System’s subscription-based business model means no data volume charges, freeing data centers to grow without constraint. This drastically reduces customers’ initial and continuing costs, and the fact that they are not locked in by license fees means Bacula is motivated to deliver even more in terms of support and functionality to ensure its customers stay with them.

Key Clientele
Any large datacenter that is using old, monolithic backup technology is a key prospect for Bacula, as it can show a huge benefit to the user in terms of saved resources, from reduced network load, to less user time, to vastly reduced license costs. With that said, some industry segments are keener to modernize and reduce costs than others. Some of these sectors would be Logistics, E-commerce and Retail, Hosting providers, Manufacturing, Telco’s and academic institutions.

The company’s big clients tend to be large data centers, universities or large research institutions where there is a desire to have a data backup solution that is flexible, customizable and very dependable. These kinds of customers typically developa lot of data volume as well, so they need a solution that is both modern and cost-effective – specifically, a reasonable pricing model that will not penalize them for having lots of data. Therefore, Bacula has customers such as NASA, Swisscom, Sky Plc, Bank Austria, University of Texas, and University of Ulm – all datacenters that typically have to deal with large volumes of data. It also has some of the highest profile military, aerospace and automobile customers.

Clients Speak
“Bacula Systems offered us a robust and cost efficient backup solution that we find is really solid and reliable. As a result, we use it throughout our entire data center.” – Thiago Salese, Operations Analyst at the Core Team Backup, Locaweb

“With Bacula Enterprise Edition, I get a great virtual and physical backup solution in one, plus fast restore ability in an environment where uptime is paramount. The modularity of this solution is highly appreciated for the flexibility it brings us.” – Jonathan Kernan, DevOps System Engineer at Sky

Global Footprint
The company has customers all over the world. But its most dense customer bases are from the U.S. and Western Europe. Therefore, the majority of Bacula’s sales and support staff are based in these geographies.

Focus Area
Right now, Bacula Systems is focused on making sure that large data centers can get a scalable, single platform solution for backing up and restoring all of its servers, databases, clients, physical and virtual environments – all from one vendor.

Knowing the Leadership Team

Frank Barker, CEO – Frank started his IT career with Hewlett-Packard in the UK, rising through Support and Sales and into Management before moving to the EMEA headquarters in Geneva to run their Telco, Financial Services and Global Accounts businesses. He subsequently ran Hewlett Packard’s Consulting and Systems Integration business across EMEA, then moved to the US to set up a worldwide Division around cloud computing. Prior to Bacula Systems he has been CEO and Managing Director for several technology companies in software and security and has a track record of successfully growing technology companies. Frank is a graduate of Harvard Business School and holds an Honours Degree in Electronics from Strathclyde University in Scotland.

Kern Sibbald, CTO and Chairman – Kern Sibbald is the Co-Founder, chairman and Chief Technical Officer of Bacula Systems. He designed and wrote most of the Bacula software; he manages the related open source project. Kern is a founder of Autodesk where he was development manager for AutoCAD, a highly successful CAD program. He established and was the Technical Director of Autodesk’s European software development center in Neuchatel, Switzerland. Kern holds a bachelors degree in physics from the University of California and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Maryland.

“ Our software offers up to ten times lower total cost of ownership compared to proprietary solutions, higher reliability and proven performance in mission-critical enterprise environments.”