Weekly Release

We’re back on our weekly release cadence after our launch. The changes this week are relatively small as we are spending a lot of time on marketing our product (something we know zilch about). Here is the list of changes:

In the Web Application:

• We added in the Jumbo Job. We’ve been testing this for awhile in the back end engine, but just now made it available. This job will retrieve up to 75 GB of data, Files and Writeboards from Basecamp and then do incremental backups of the changes on a daily basis. This maps to the Basecamp Premium Plan.

In the Core Engine:

The primary changes in the Core engine were bug fixes.

• We fixed a bug with downloading Writeboards. Sort of a weird one where the encoding got messed up logging into the Writeboard when the user who last updated the Writeboard was different than the user our application was configured to log in as.
• Another bug was discovered by one of our customers was around login to Dropbox. The encoding of passwords with a couple of characters, specifically HTTP URL reserved characters, was getting messed up and causing the login to fail.

Our product covered on the 37Signals Product Blog

The team at 37Signals was kind enough to write up a blog post about our product. The ability for a Basecamp customer to backup all of their files, data and Writeboards on a regular schedule has been a long time request of the Basecamp team. There have been numerous discussions about it, even people practically begging and threatening for it. This capability is exactly what Centripetal Retrieve for Basecamp does, and we work hard to make it the most comprehensive backup solution for Basecamp. So we really feel like we have a product that is beneficial to 37Signals, and more importantly, to their customers.

Check out the blog post at http://productblog.37signals.com

Comparison with our competition

A potential customer recently wrote to me to ask for a comparison between Centripetal Retrieve for Basecamp and a competitor of ours. I thought it was good information so I am sharing my response with everyone here.

 

Thanks for checking us out. The differences that I have seen are as follows:

1) Our service works. I have had an account with our competitor for a few months now and am yet to receive any files or data from my Basecamp backup with them. They are very focused on growing their user base around twitter and gmail and seem to have let their Basecamp integration lapse. Basecamp's login process recently changed and it may be that this competitor has not updated their system yet, although it didn't work for me prior to that change either. I would love to hear if you are able to get it working. From our side, we are focused exclusively on being the best at backing up Basecamp. We support backing up all data, files and Writeboards. Because we are more narrowly focused in what we are doing we are able to more quickly react to changes from Basecamp and keep our service working. We have been in beta for about a month and a half in which we did consistent back ups for about 30 customers. Just yesterday we completed a backup for a customer in our full release, that had 42GB of files and delivered it to their Dropbox account. We will add services in the future, but we will always strive to be the absolute best and most comprehensive backup solution for each service we do and will not ever let our integrations lapse. We want to build a product that our customers can depend on.

2) While our competitor is free now, their model is to charge based on the amount of data you store with them, which with a significant amount of data, may cost more than our service. Our plans and pricing will always be transparent so that you know exactly how much you will be getting billed each month, it is not going to change based on an amount of data or anything else that may surprise your wallet. We will likely offer a managed storage solution as an option with a set rate not based on a per GB storage cost, but right now we give your data to you. This can be done via FTP or Dropbox.

3) Another difference is on the focus of each company in the options provided. Our competitor is focusing on giving their users lots of options on what services to backup, they support twitter, facebook, gmail, flikr, etc. We have chosen to focus in on Basecamp exclusively for the current time and provide the options on the storage side of the equation. We currently allow you to choose to have your files stored by Dropbox or FTP. We are working on a DVD mailing service as well as some other online storage options. We have heard from our customers that they want to integrate their data into existing backup solutions that they have and that they don't want to just copy their data to yet another cloud storage system, they want to have it on their computers. So this is where we have chosen to focus our efforts.

4) Building out lots of service integrations is probably the right thing for our competitor to do, they are focused more on the consumer side of things and consumers will likely want more of a breadth type of offering. We are focused on business users and this drives us to work very hard on reliability and correctness of the service. It is not ok to our customers for the service to work some of the time or most of the time, it has to work all of the time. As companies move more and more of their data into cloud based applications they want to know that those services are going to be available to run their businesses, so when they invest in a backup product for those services they also want to be sure that the backup is going to work all the time in the event that something happens that causes them to need that backup.

In the mean time, our competitor is free and we offer a 30 day free trial so you can certainly run your own comparison of the two services. If you do I would love to hear about what you find out.

Another giveaway

We have even more software to give away. This time we’re running another contest based on survey respondents. Fill out our 2 question survey about what online business applications you use at work and we’ll enter you into the drawing for a copy of Microsoft Windows 7 Professional.

Fill out the survey

What happens if your SaaS, IaaS, or PaaS vendor closes shop?

 

In response to the following topic on a SaaS forum:

I haven't seen a lot of direct answers to this topic, so I'd like to hear from SaaS, IaaS, or PaaS providers on how they answer this question for their customers. What assurances to give them against this possibility? What contingencies are typically built into contracts?

I posted the following response:

Even though most people here say that their product allows for backups or exports of data the truth is that most SaaS applications don't have this capability at all, or have it in a limited fashion that would be extremely difficult to migrate elsewhere without a ton of work. These concerns about data ownership and disaster recovery (ie. going out of business) are some of the top concerns that our partners hear on a daily basis in their sales calls. For larger deployments many customers are demanding escrow type solutions for their data or other legal mechanisms for addressing their concerns.

Having a backup or export functionality as part of the solution that a customer is buying is often not actually a viable option. So many of these export capabilities in SaaS apps require an administrator to go in and make a request through a webpage and then go back and download it once the export has been completed and an email sent notifying them of it. For an organization that has backup solutions in place, adding a manual step is likely to get missed, error prone, and untenable. When IT wants to back up an application in their own data center they automate every step of it using highly sophisticated backup tools. This is one of the things that is hindering adoption of SaaS. There is a need for SaaS applications to be able to play nice with existing IT infrastructure and processes and they currently just don't do that.

This is what my company, Centripetal Software, is attempting to address. There is a need to extend IT out from within the organization to the SaaS applications that the Line Of Business wants to use. Bringing critical business data back into the organization is a key requirement for many, and this must be done reliably and in an automated fashion. Our product, Centripetal Retrieve, integrates with existing cloud based applications to provide full and incremental backups of data and files and integrate them into IT infrastructure within an organization. http://www.centripetalsoftware.com

Patient Education Systems Case Study

Patient Education Systems is a customer of Centripetal Software using our Centripetal Retrieve for Basecamp product. We recently met up with Cordell Baanhofman, Vice President of Technology and Corporate Development at Patient Education Systems, to find out a little bit more about why they chose Centripetal Retrieve to backup their files, Writeboards and data from Basecamp. We wrote up our findings as a short case study.

 

The Customer
Patient Education System (PES) is focused on helping Physicians, their staff and vendors improve the patient experience at the point of care. Designed by physicians for physicians and their patients, their digital media platform seamlessly connects doctors, patients and vendors together in a private “one to one” channel of communication.

The Challenge
PES has two key vendors using Basecamp extensively. Both use Basecamp to manage projects and share deliverables, reports and invoices with PES. The Basecamp accounts are owned and managed by the vendors, PES has been granted access as a collaborating company within the vendor’s account.

The team at PES has 3 main challenges that they are dealing with in their collaboration with their vendors in Basecamp:

1. As a company that is entrusting their core intellectual property to 3rd party vendors, PES wants to ensure that they always have access to their data and files even in the unlikely case where there is break in the relationship that causes a loss of data and deliverables. They tried downloading everything manually as it changed, but the number of files and amount of data was too much to keep up with and it was an inefficient use of time.
2. As they are dealing with multiple vendors and multiple Basecamp accounts they struggle with the continuity of the data as it spans different locations that they need to access. This makes it difficult to locate specific files or data and to keep all deliverables synchronized.
3. Many of the deliverables that they receive from their vendors are large zip files that must be downloaded individually. Searching through the contents of these files across multiple accounts and numerous versions can also be difficult in addition to the need to download so many files one by one.

The Solution
PES found Centripetal Retrieve for Basecamp and was able to setup an ongoing backup job for each of the Basecamp accounts that held their data, files and Writeboards. They receive a complete backup once a month and incremental backups of all new and updated files 3 times each week. All of this is delivered to their internal FTP server and from there, they are able to keep archives of everything from all their Basecamp accounts in one place and easily search across everything from their desktop.

The Result
PES has greatly increased their level of comfort that they maintain control of their core intellectual property and know that they protected from a potential disaster. They have easier access to everything in one place which they can easily search and access at anytime.

Patient Education Systems – http://www.peshealth.com
Centripetal Software – http://www.centripetalsoftware.com

Announcing the release of Centripetal Retrieve for Basecamp

After a month long beta we’re pleased to announce the general availability of our product Centripetal Retrieve for Basecamp™. The most comprehensive backup tool for business users of 37Signals Basecamp™. Our product backs up all of your data, files and Writeboards and delivers it to you via Dropbox™ or FTP.

We started out by making a product we needed ourselves. We then worked hard to enhance it for our alpha and beta users. Now, we are opening it to everyone. Our users feedback is what shapes the product. We'll be continuing to engage our users and enhance Centripetal Retrieve based on your feedback.

General

• Centripetal Retrieve is a hosted application that runs in the cloud.

 

Features

• Complete Retrieval of all your Basecamp™ Data, Files & Writeboards.
• Control where your data is stored. Choose Dropbox™ or FTP.
• Secured using the latest encryption algorithms when transferring data.
• Stored in non-proprietary formats that you can access at anytime.
• Control when your data is retrieved through our automated scheduling.
• Peace of Mind that you are in control of your data.

 

Pricing

• Plans starting from FREE up to $55/month
• 30-day Free Trial on all Basecamp Backup Jobs

 

Overview Video

 

More Information

• Company Website: http://www.centripetalsoftware.com
• Company Blog: http://blog.centripetalsoftware.com/
• General Information: info@centripetalsoftware.com
• Press Inquiries: press@centripetalsoftware.com
• Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/centripetalhq
• Product Tour: http://www.centripetalsoftware.com/product_tour/index.html

The global nature of running a startup

One of the things that I love about running my own startup is the chance to interact directly with my customers and other people. In my many years working at Microsoft and Sun Microsystems before that I rarely got the opportunity to meet and talk with customers. There was always the customer support team, or the business development group, or some other group that “owned” the customer. And the last thing anyone wanted was for an engineer to talk to a customer <gasp> who knows what they might say…. So, needless to say it is refreshing to be able to work directly with customers and other people that are connected to my business. This might be helping a customer through a problem they are having and in the process understanding how to make it more intuitive for the next person, or walking a vendor through code explaining the reasoning for implementations (which helps me think it through also). The benefit of the direct interaction is huge for my company and I believe it has been beneficial for my customers as well.

This week has been particularly interesting as we are preparing to launch our product out of beta and into its full release. I found myself smiling at the global nature of a small startup and somewhat awed by the reach that the internet of today allows. So much of this wasn’t possible even 5 years ago, well maybe technically possible, but highly unlikely at least. This week alone I have been on Skype with customers in Colorado, Florida and Switzerland; exchanged multiple emails with customers in New York, UK and Australia; interacted through web tools with developers and writers in South Africa, Philippines, China and India; worked with my test team who are distributed in places like India, Canada, Chile and the USA. All of this from my tiny office in Carpinteria, CA. The world is getting smaller.

What's Your Problem?

I often go back and read Getting Real from the guys at 37Signals. It’s a great book (available online for free) about keeping things simple in the software world. Every once in awhile I start to freak out about my business and fell like I need to go get lots of venture capital so I can hire lots of people so I can build tons of features…. Well this is exactly what Getting Real addresses. I was just re-reading the essay titled “What’s Your Problem?” and thought I’d share a bit about how Centripetal Software got started. The premise of this article is that you should build software for yourself because then you’ll be more passionate about it and you are your own user so you can make more informed decisions more quickly.

I have a 4 year old son. When he was born we needed a way to share his life with our families around the world, so I started up a free blog on Blogspot. That turned into our family picture album, we have about 1500 posts over the 4 years including some 5000 pictures and 300 videos not to mention all the stories written down to go with each post. About a year ago I started to realize that this was more than just a blog, it was really our only family album and it had a lot of memories in it, and I realized I really didn’t want to lose it. I started looking around for a way to save it off, but there was nothing out there. So, as any good software developer would do, I started to build my own. At first I was looking to build something to allow us to print it, but that had its limits, so I moved onto more of a backup solution that would allow me to have a local copy of the blog. As I got deeper into the implementation of this I started seeing that it would work for other things that I did online, the first of which was my Basecamp account. I built out some rudimentary integrations with Basecamp to meet my needs. As I began using Basecamp more and more there were more and more things I needed to backup and eventually (after a couple complete re-writes of the code) I had a pretty stable piece of code.

It was one day as I was looking for something in the Basecamp forums that I realized that my little homegrown application might have a broader appeal as there were quite a few people in the forums asking for pretty much exactly what I had. That is when I decided to try to make a product out of my tool. After reworking the solution some so that it would allow other people to use it I threw it out there for some people to try. I was given lots of feedback and was able to iterate on it and improve it quite a bit. I was blown away with the response I got and people were really excited about having a solution like mine available. The time I was investing in this was beginning to be somewhat taxing, so about 3 months ago we took the plunge, I quit my job at Microsoft and went out on my own with the hopes of creating a real business out of this.

Fast forward to today and we have come through a successful beta period with the application and we are officially launching the product on Monday, Feb 1, 2010! We’ll continue to build out the things that we need for ourselves and work hard to keep a solid, stable, working product for our customers that is simply a joy to use.

Article: Why you need a SaaS Strategy

There is a great article over at Information Week about why companies need a SaaS strategy. Hosted business applications as a market in itself is still quite new and is something that many businesses are just starting to explore. It’s imperative that IT departments take a long term approach to their adoption of cloud applications.

While SaaS shifts software deployment and maintenance burdens to the service provider, freeing up resources for other projects, IT is at the mercy of the provider for availability, data security, regulatory compliance, and other key issues. Outages will halt business, and poor response times will hamper productivity. SaaS apps aren't just a nice-to-have. Three-fourths of companies using SaaS consider application services extremely or critically important to their organizations, according to our InformationWeek Analytics survey of 281 business technologists, including 131 who now use SaaS. About one-third describe their SaaS apps as mission critical.

When Cloud applications become mission critical to a business there is an imperative to extend core IT principles to those cloud applications. Clearly this is a concern for many who are investigating SaaS adoption:

Data ownership is also a big obstacle, with 31% citing it as a reason they're not using SaaS. In speaking with SaaS vendors, they say security, privacy, and portability are the three objections they hear most. Portability will likely be one of the biggest worries this year, as companies pour more data into these apps and, having gained some SaaS experience and seen the growing number of choices, start switching providers.

The author goes on to discuss 9 key areas that need to be addressed when adopting SaaS applications for your business. A couple of them are items that I am consistently touting from my little soapbox in the world.

Have a detailed exit strategy. If you do cancel, can you get your data back, and in a form that you can use? This will become one of the biggest questions around SaaS in the coming year, as companies put increasingly vital information into these platforms, in increasingly large quantities. So make sure you have a plan to move data when you want to change providers, or bring the solution back in-house.

When you are putting your critical business data into someone else’s database and storing your important documents on someone else’s hard drive you need to be sure that you can get it out for any reason. That might be that you want to switch to another provider, you might want to integrate it into other applications, or it might just be that you want to have a full backup copy of it. Whatever the case you need to make sure that any cloud application you sign up for provides this capability or there is a third party tool that will allow you to extract that data for you.

Create a contingency plan. With SaaS, we haven't left the concept of five nines behind. While satisfaction levels are high for SaaS, IT must have a backup plan for apps that can't go down or data that can't be lost. It's critical to classify the type of data you need to back up.

Even though your SaaS provider will tell you that they are backing up your data for you any IT department worth their salaries will be skeptical of that. Until you have seen the backup data and know that you can access it when you need it you should keep looking for a backup solution. Fortunately there are beginning to be a number of third party services that can backup data for you from online applications and deliver that data directly to you.

 

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