Forrester defines social CRM as the way customers buy from and interact with organizations of all types through social media. In its recent paper “Social CRM Goes Mainstream,” Forrester shines a new light on customer relationship management. We are...

It was 23 years ago that I published the first edition of The RBS Book, defining the online backup industry. I am happy to announce that I have finished a new book, and the electronic version is available. The Trade Paperback will be available at Amazon.com and your local book store soon.

There has been a lot of talk about Synthetic Backups lately, and especially a lot of bitter complaining that one of my competitors promised it to his users but hasn't delivered it. I'm going to use Synthetic Backups as a club now, to beat up that competitor.

I’ve been fiddling around with some ideas for tools that can give your customers more information about pricing and backup time. This time I came up with a spreadsheet that can estimate monthly pricing based on increasing storage space, and backup time for the first full backup and subsequent smaller backups

For the rest of the month of January I will be donating 10% of Remote Backup Systems’ gross sales for humanitarian relief in Haiti. The money will go to the funds listed on this page. I encourage you to donate on your own, as well. Injured people who could be saved with medical attention may […]

Online Backup Software Provider Lowers Prices on Products

I have a competitor in my industry (Let’s call the company "Ashtray.") who has just announced a January 1 price increase of 200% to 300% on most items. In an open letter to their customers, Ashtray also apologized for a recent software release that caused massive, repeatable data loss for many of their Service Providers, and announced that they were "pretty confident" that it should resolve at least 90% of the problem. I guess this means that they are also "pretty confident" that at least 10% of their users will still experience massive data loss.

The RBS News for December 2009 contains the following articles: How to Set Prices & Storage Plans, Predict Profits for your Online Backup Service Letter from the President News and Announcements Sales and Marketing Performance Tips Gautam’s Corner – our Lead Developer Answers Your Questions Service Providers with Premium Maintenance now have a FREE Remote […]

How can any online backup company afford to offer "unlimited" backups? Doesn't "unlimited" mean unlimited? Can't I store as many files as a want, use up as much bandwidth as I like, and eat terabytes of storage space for just $4.95/month?

I do not like to see any company fail. But I've said it before - peer-to-peer online backup is just a bad idea. OK, I'll qualify that - it's a bad idea from a marketing perspective. The general public is just now comfortable sending their data to a reputable and well-protected data center. They will never be as comfortable storing their data on their friends' computers.