IT Pro Start-Up Tour: i365

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Who are they?

Not doing drugs, getting a pension whilst young, not talking to strangers, wearing sunscreen, shoving knives in toasters - apart from the last one, these are all sensible things.

Often, sensible is the best approach, and this is something which is firmly entrenched in the ethos of i365 – a backup company and subsidiary of Seagate.

Without having spent a huge amount of money on its own data centres, i365 supports mid-level companies with their cloud and on-premise based storage needs. It’s not the most enthralling of companies, but it’s one that’ll likely make a fair buck or two.

The firm was born in 2009 out of a variety of Seagate acquisitions – the key one being EVault, which makes up the bulk of i365’s current product offering. It now has around 32,000 customers, so is clearly doing something right.

There is a seismic shift in the storage solutions market as companies move from on-premise to hybrid solutions.

You might be forgiven for thinking i365 was just a small part of Seagate’s business, given the storage giant has loaned out some of its office space to its young subsidiary for our meeting. But i365 considers itself a separate entity, not guided by the leviathan which owns it.
The borrowing of Seagate’s space was apt considering what the start-up actually does.

The company operates in what it calls the “cloud-connected storage” market. Hybrid is the key term here – living with your head in the clouds yet remaining firmly grounded within your own premises.

If you want to have your in-house data replicated in another location and you want it delivered back over the wire rather than tape, i365 is there for you.

Why should you care?

Cloud storage is going to be big. In the coming years, analysts think the market going to grow like an adolescent on steroids. It’ll be worth $5 billion by 2012, according to Gartner.

i365 believes a key reason why the industry is set to boom is because the right technology is now available at the right price. In particular, bandwidth to move data to and from the cloud doesn’t cost an arm and a leg anymore.

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