Data recovery booms via channel

Information retrieval specialist CBL Data Recovery has trebled its reseller numbers this year and plans to add more to reinforce a wave of demand for disaster recovery services.

Guy Riddle, Sydney manager of the US-based company, said the Australian division's partner numbers had gone from 15 to about 43 over the past year. That included resellers in places such as Darwin, Airlie Beach and Perth.

"They're typically organisations that are providing some sort of network infrastructure services to companies, what I would call a VAR," he said.

Managed service providers were using CBL Data Recovery, which divided its resellers into referral-based and full service partnerships, he said.

The company was also negotiating potential partnership deals with OEMs and system builders such as Optima, Volante/Ipex, Seagate, Maxtor, IBM and Dell,Riddle said.

"One of the things I am trying to do, one of my longer-term missions, is go to the source -- which is basically OEMs and system builders," he said.

"If you have any problems with a computer that you buy, they will be quite happy to give you something within the warranty, a replacement part or component, but completely absolve themselves of responsibility for the data."

Riddle said CBL Data Recovery wanted to partner major vendors and system builders to provide data recovery services, boosting the one-stop shop angle for vendors and customers.

"Margin on hardware is pretty dead. Maybe consider this as another service offering," he said.

CBL Data Recovery had a clean room in Brisbane and office in Sydney that were successfully handling the current workload. However, if demand continued to increase as expected, a clean room in Sydney might be on the cards within a year, Riddle said.

"We would ideally like to see another 50 percent growth over the next 12 months. If we can get 100 percent growth, that would be fantastic," he said.

The services appealed to small, home office operations to mid-size companies and huge enterprises. All were becoming increasingly reliant on information stored using IT, and needed ways to retrieve it should things go wrong, Riddle pointed out.