Dropmysite aims to serve the underserved

Dropmysite aims to serve the underserved: Page 2 of 2

By Gabey Goh April 22, 2014

Growing to greater heights

El-Ansari has not been the CEO of Dropmysite for very long, but he was a part of its growth from the onset, laying claim to being the first investor in the fledgling business via its investment holding firm Gilcrux Holdings.

“I’ve known [Dropmysite founder] John [Fearon] for a long time; the company had reached a stage where it needed to get to the next step and I agreed to join and help with that,” he says.

Since coming on board in October of 2013, he has been focused on positioning Dropmysite as a great partner to hosting providers, telcos and service providers, hence its participation at the Parallels Summit.

“It takes a lot of good, honest grunt work -- our team has been developing all the integrations and APIs (application programming interfaces), churning out white papers and addressing the whole enchilada of enterprise business.

“That’s what I’ve been doing for the past few months. We want to make ours a plug-and-play solution for partners to adopt and more importantly, to make it easy for end-users to choose our service and start using seamlessly,” he adds.

As part of that overall mission, the company has also been busy integrating Parallels Automation and Application Packaging Standard(APS) 2.0, that was announced during the New Orleans Summit.

The platform upgrade now offers partners a pluggable single sign-on service bus architecture, and customisable user interfaces enabling service providers to seamlessly offer differentiated bundles of cloud services.

“We’re in the process of moving up the value chain with APS 2.0, and creating packages for email backup and archiving, which is a demand-driven request as many of our customers have asked for it,” says El-Ansari.

In his eyes, Dropmysite sits in a unique position within the landscape of similar offerings around the world, due to its combination of both data and email backup services. The company also now offers backup services for the Android mobile platform.

“It’s now so critical to so many businesses. Your website is now your lifeline in terms of a customer touch point and sales channel, not to mention emails for communications.

“Many people offer email backup services, which shows that there is a huge market out there for this. There is an explosion of corporate emails, with the rough estimate at one billion corporate email accounts and growing at 7-8% a year.

“Just imagine how many of those accounts are actually backed up,” he says.

Thanks to the nature of cloud-based businesses, Dropmysite already caters to a global clientele with efforts underway to further strengthen its network of partners and customers.

On April 21, the company announced that GMO Pepabo Inc, one of Japan’s biggest web hosting firms, will now provide its LOLIPOP! Web/DB backup service powered by Dropmysite's technology, to its 392,000 customers.

In a statement, GMO Pepabo president Sato Kentaro said that the website backup product was built to be safe, easy to use and economical, and offers LOLIPOP! users the option to back up up to seven generations of data with a single click for a monthly fee of ¥300 (US$2.93).

With this announcement, Dropmysite is making its presence felt in Japan. Besides GMO Pepabo, the company is also in talks with other companies to create unique partnerships to further expand into the Japanese market.

“We are an agile, flexible and straightforward company to work with. For example, our standard non-disclosure agreement for prospective partners is only one page long. This enables us to work quickly and get things done,” says El-Ansari.