August 18, 2023
Discovering China's BaaS Giants: An Insight into BackupNow | Episode #71
BackupNow is at the forefront of AI-driven backup solutions, reshaping how businesses approach data backup, especially in the Chinese tech market. In this episode, we sit down with Albert Fu, CEO of BackupNow, to discuss the company's origins, its significant collaborations with tech giants such as Microsoft, Huawei, and Veeam, and its innovations in the backup domain. Wi…
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BackupNow is at the forefront of AI-driven backup solutions, reshaping how businesses approach data backup, especially in the Chinese tech market. In this episode, we sit down with Albert Fu, CEO of BackupNow, to discuss the company's origins, its significant collaborations with tech giants such as Microsoft, Huawei, and Veeam, and its innovations in the backup domain. With a focus on SupVault, BackupNow's standout product, Albert provides insights into the company's mission, challenges, and future trajectory, especially with the influence of AI. Headquartered in China, BackupNow exemplifies the nation's growing technological influence.
探索中国的BaaS巨头：深入了解BackupNow | GTwGT播客#71
Exploring BackupNow: China's Emerging Force in AI-Driven Backup Solutions
BackupNow is at the forefront of AI-driven backup solutions, reshaping how businesses approach data backup, especially in the Chinese tech market. In this episode, we sit down with Albert Fu, CEO of BackupNow, to discuss the company's origins, its significant collaborations with tech giants such as Microsoft, Huawei, and Veeam, and its innovations in the backup domain. With a focus on SupVault, BackupNow's standout product, Albert provides insights into the company's mission, challenges, and future trajectory, especially with the influence of AI. Headquartered in China, BackupNow exemplifies the nation's growing technological influence.
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☑️ Technology and Technology Partners Mentioned: BackupNow, Data Backup, AI Backup Solutions, SupVault, Chinese Technology, Cloud Services, Data Protection, Ransomware Defense, Strategic Deployments, Veeam, Microsoft Azure, Huawei.
☑️ Web: [BackupNow's official website link] ☑️ LinkedIn: [BackupNow's LinkedIn link]
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Transcript
foreign hello and welcome to episode 71 of great things with great Tech the podcast highlighting companies doing great things with great technology my name's Anthony spiteri and in this episode we delve into the evolving landscape of backup Solutions data protection and the influence of AI technology in that space that company is back up now and I'm joined by Albert Foo the CEO and co-founder or founder actually of backup now welcome to the show thank you thank you Anthony yeah I'm so excited to have you on
because it's a few firsts for me on the show firstly it's a first in having really someone representing Asia outside of a Australian company and number two I think just having a chinese-based company as well is is quite special because there's there's all these um you know sort of differences and nuances with the way that China does things um so I'm really interested to get into that but just before we talk about you know back up China the state of the market and a few other things that you
offer I just want to give out a reminder that if you're a fan of great things with great Tech and would like to feature in future episodes you can click on the link on the show notes or head to gtwgt.com and express your interest as a reminder all episodes of jtwgt uh on all renowned podcasting platforms Google Apple Spotify all hosted and distributed by Spotify podcasts and finally go to YouTube hit the like And subscribe and alert button to make sure that you are up to date with all future episodes so
Albert with that out of the way maybe just give an introduction to yourself and a little bit of an intro into your journey into technology in China yeah sure actually uh I've started to work at a 2006 and actually working for an American company in China and I'm in charge of old id departments and a data center in China region and during the technology passing the recent years though and the most of the data center moved to the cloud so that's the thing to make a processing like the revolution of the technology the people think about
is that possible we will need to maintenance all the data center by ourselves no so the cloud cloud services or Cloud technology will be popular in China started from the 2014 or 2015. so during that years I I plan to just to do my own business about the cloud services and maybe the cloud architecture or the cloud migration so I have to start my team and from 2016.
and we start at Microsoft editor because points of us yeah both of us are from the Microsoft training center and they're where the Microsoft Adder Architects so from the 2016 will touch the cloud of business and it's very funny we we always work with the data data migration data recovery and the how to say data mover to another Cloud maybe and this so from that time we're thinking about it doesn't have a opportunity all the how to say we call the product can help us easily to maintenance our hosting data and
hosting services and provide to our customer so we have a touch of the maybe the other how to say we call the other backup server that's the first time and it's not that powerful and we continue to calculate the win from the 2019 and it gets shocked by our our update technology team it's really sharp and the they have many power functions for us like to have to migrate the local the win-wear data center to the cloud and there with hosting and we're using the orchestrator to do the Dr and everything looks perfect for us
so that's why we to uh to make our business from the just the cloud hosting to data protection expert and the in just for last year we found it actually when our business going we find the the main label and the AI get of the computation with both of us in China we think about it that possible we're using the AI to do some job instead of the Manpower so we started to in touch up this area so that's why we have a little bit AI development and in our products okay so that's that's our account that's a very
yeah that's a good that's a good explanation overview okay podcast don't even know this is just joking um let's let's step back a little bit to I think just before you I was interested in something that you said about how you became you know you worked for a big American company and then you know you focused on Azure services in China which and people that that don't know a bit of the differences and the nuances of the China Market um maybe just just give a little bit of a background very quickly as to what is
different because you know the public cloud and the services there are very different for obvious reasons um in China to say outside of China maybe give a little overview as to the the basic differences and then I've got another question for you after that around how you then learn and become a specialist in that market yeah no problem I could be trained the China and overseeing the cloud Market that's quite a differently in China we have many Cloud providers many so that I mean that the owing one actually they
have hosting they have a computer they have the uh GPU results and having them maybe the data storage resource in the public cloud and they have many of them over maybe 20 Cloud providers and they do the competition a lot and actually they didn't go deeper in the technology development but they can't say to company to the price everyone is about to make the price lower and cheaper to earn the market but actually it's not that stable and solid so compare with the overseeing we can we can know like the adder AWS and Google
their top three maybe in the overseeing market because they have the huge customer to give them they have say the money to to grow their business but in China each of the cloud providers they're surviving it's not that good because maybe only early part we call Audi ring in China and the Huawei and also China Telecom these three yeah to earn the market rest of them like the 10 cent like the upstate the Baidu they are not that really good interesting yeah so there's it's so it's not the same Market landscape as what is
outside of China but to a certain extent it's it's sort of the same in that there's lots of other providers that are tier two tier three providers that I would call them that basically take up the slack from what would be the top providers outside of China so again Azure AWS and Google obviously from a public Cloud perspective dominate worldwide but from what you're saying in China they don't dominate as much because there's a lot more option right and then there's a that potentially is that a is it a
people thing is it a just the sheer amount of people businesses or is it actually a trust thing or what actually drives that behavior in China um that quite a little bit complex for that you know in China actually until now maybe half out of half of the customer didn't trust the cloud why actually I can totally understand the reason they didn't pass the clock because in the overthink like an overseas company maybe uh an Australian company when they want to go to our Cloud they have a technical team to help them to design the
architecture and design the security and to get them to know how much you should pay for the entire year and what kind of results you need to use but in China no when you buy a cloud server or multi application on the China cloud you just buy the server like buy something on the eBay you just click next next next and select how many CPU and how much run and that's all you have a server public the RDP port on the internet so they have been attacked many times so they think that the resources uh it's it's on sale
but it says unfair for the public cloud provider so that's why you asked me about that question I think in China the cloud storage is the requirement I increase every year and the people do think about the cloud and that it's not it's not that solid and stable yeah because of the sorry you go ahead I was going to say is that just through as well um you know Chinese Customs business practices consumer preference is that kind of why you are able to be so successful in the marketers and do very well because you
know the traditionalism of what people think in business leads them to someone like you over a more traditional public Cloud Powerhouse and actually that's the key point in the China Market where for like the company like us we normally we should provide the professional service for our customers and the you know in China they kind of have to say like the uh old sustaining way the service is free the product that you can pay but the series you need to provide in free yeah so that's why nobody want to do that in
free and that's why sometimes it's just buying the cloud resource and most of companies like us they cannot Survivor Survivor very good they don't have the money to and to pay for their services to pay for the engineer so that's the problem yeah and going back to the engineering and the services and you mentioned at the start um an academy or or a place where you learn to do it so in in China when you're growing up and you want to be you want to be in technology what's the path I'm interested in the pathway like how
do you go into a into a program where there's multiple people like thousands of people learning the one thing in an academy then you all come out in the same way or is it more individual how does that work in China because I know how I know how that works in say India and a few other places but I'm interested in China oh that's very interesting in China we have some academic uh school and they can to teach the how to say like the University students or the college students for the maybe like the physical
like the Microsoft red hat and they have some lessons and they can have the certification for that and normally they get the how to say to pay for the creation fee and the condemn fee we can get that and the rest of them they don't have time to go to the school or go to the training center so they will learn by themselves they can learn it online and the real in the past three days about the obviously the pandemic of the the covid-19 and most of them then they get very suitable for the online training so we can train the how to
select the Microsoft the red hat and the VMware Cisco even Huawei they can train the people online so this is online it's a pretty good solution for the trainer to to learn the skills yeah and I think that lends itself I know that China has a very thriving start-up culture now um you take hubs in in senjan and Beijing um and I know there's a Chinese philosophy of fast following where you quickly adapt and improve upon existing Tech Innovations so is that drilled into you as a young person going up up the
ranks as well this this whole concept of we must be Innovative and we've got to be technically Advanced as a as a culture uh actually no and from the technical side sometimes are like an engineer of us and we think about to learn how to to uh how is the world uh growing that their technology like we need to go out and see what kind of technology in the outside and the inside actually it's not really much and you know in China their main kind they'll always thinking about uh we want to keep safe everybody
should be safe and we wanted to keep the word safe and in China Mainland sometimes we think about we can travel over the world and we can travel all the China area and we don't need to worry about that but you know yeah uh as to how to say a Chinese citizen are to be honest that China is producing and the but the technology yes you're right the technology and because the country and the policy issue most of the foreign company or the tech company they're stopped working with the China local company and most of them we
cannot get the lack of say the technology skills as soon as possible so we need to learn from our side and yes that's what happened it happened from the 2019 and most of us and stop working to learn because they don't have the resource so that's the problem recently happened in recent years in China local market from the technical side yeah so the market isn't without challenges and you know domestic competition seems like it's it's very stiff there's lots of competition because there's lots of the just by
sheer volume of population companies and whatnot so how do you what do you think is different in the China Market from the point of view of competition versus outside the world actually uh as a half State company runner in China and we needed to fix the problem in the China market and recently the China Market is divided into two parts the first part you're doing the business with the government or the government related company and you need to provide everything in they have to say we call it a c-tron like everything
built in China everything made from the China Company like the software Hardware chips everything that's for the China marketer part another product China is open com Open Country so that means the authority company is still here we need to do the business with this part and most of them they don't want to use the how to say like the Huawei product or the everything during the Dell or HP is yes that's that's the situation we have so we need to prepare the products for the two part of the business
so most of the China are say the reseller or the product manufacturer their changes there how to stay their vision of their technical development focus on there how to say we call it the china-made chips this area because the government want that and the government can pay that much and the deal will be the high so that's why if you want other money in the rep in the fastest speed you need to do something related with the China government or the China government related company so that's the situation yeah and how
does that then impact your you say for yourself and back up now how does that impact your ability to interact with uh with foreign Partners as an example obviously you mentioned vein we know that that's why the conversation is happening now but just in general does you have to think about how you productize certain Technologies because of that or do you kind of go yeah the government does one thing but I believe that I can still do something better or equal with foreign technology so I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna hedge my bets
and go two ways effectively sure that's the that's the thing where started to do that in the last year actually from last year we need to fix the market you know we cooperate with win so that means actually if you're using the win and engine to provide the backup services the China Market will also sorry the China customer will ask that question is that your engine saved or secure and I say okay so actually wind product is much more transparency product they don't have some back end or the back
door for that and that first thing and the second the data is saved on maybe a Huawei data store it's not on there maybe the Dell EMC yes so that means the engine just like a worker to move and do the job and in your your Trader your data like a tradable still in the how to say yeah the achieve in the highway storage chip so it's not it's made in China so your data steals things yeah and that's that's what I think is the point that I'm trying to get is that obviously there's a compliancy and a
government push for you know the data to be generated and secured and stored on Chinese technology so as long as it ends on a Huawei system as an example then that's that's a good thing and you're basically leveraging other technology Partners like veeam to to move the data but it's not seen as a critical component for the compliancy of the storage of that data so in that sense you can benefit from both worlds basically yeah that's that's the thing to until now we can do that and the in the in
maybe in the next year we still do the developing for that within the next year we're trying to do like some backup agent process and there maybe in the how to say our own uh coding so that's why we can provide the decoding to the government let them to check if that's safe enough and we can use that property to cooperate with the wing engine to do some how to say backup from there maybe the kind of local HCI platform to read the data and grab the data to our backup reports trade so that's the thing that
we call it to change your way to win the business with the win and so that's the things we're doing right now yeah it sounds really good and I definitely um you know the second part of this episode will be about you know your products and what you do and what you offer but just to finish off the the conversation around China and the market again it's very fascinating to chat about these things with you what would you say is your biggest uh challenge or inhibitor you know being in China and understanding that you do work you're
primarily focused on your Chinese market and that's one thing and Chinese customers and businesses but you need to think bigger picture worldwide with regards to how you bring your Technologies to Market so what would be the biggest challenge that you face you know being a Chinese company in a global world um to be honest actually if you just owning a China Company in China that should be fine right now but if you're doing the business in the overseas even in the Asia Pacific area there still have a little bit problem
like that your your transfer currency like how to say you pay over Saturday because China government have very strategy that they the foreign currency payment policy I cannot just receive the the foreign dollars directly I cannot pay them directly I need to go apply to pay and apply to the how to say like the currency control by rule let them to know I need to pay the money for the overseas so we have some business doing in the Malaysia and they pay us the US Dollars and after a month I can receive it as a private documentary so that's
the thing that it's a just a China only own that company it's very hard to do the business in the overseas and the only way we can to solve this problem is we have to open our financial office oh the how to say another company all the headquarters move to the overseas like the Singapore yes so that's the thing you some company already did before and we are trying to find a way to seal problem and actually we hope everything everybody on Earth can be safe and we don't want to see many words so we can
doing the technology business very good I really admit that maybe from the 2010 to 2018 that 80 years really get me shocked and I learned and started my job and actually to start my own business in those years and it's pretty good but recently years I know that we cannot change the world but we hope to do something good for the world that's really really good I love that way of thinking it's really commendable so let's let's talk about the business now we've talked about China and everything
but let's talk about you know what you guys do in backup now and and what your products subfold and whatnot so just give a very quick overview of the services that you offer and then we're going to focus on obviously the backup and Disaster Recovery part of that talk about the AI that you've been you're putting into the into the technology and then also the amount of I'm very like taken aback by your volume that you're storing it's it's petabytes right but just start off by saying exactly you
know what backup now offers and a general overview of the company but sure the backup load actually we provide like the bus and the draft platform in China region and we cooperate with some data center and like the Telecom uh companies and we can uh provided a service for the backup as a service for the maybe the soft service like the office 65 backup and the point protection and the Cloud Server protection to our data platform and the Southward is our age Appliance it can be did how to say backup and restore all in
one machine and also it can be the one accelerated machine in the client side they can backup and their mood data through our platform also they can be the list of the recovery age of Appliance in the our customer data center they can fast in the rapid speed to restore the services for our client and now we have the part of the today 2.
7 wow okay that's big and yes and actually it's based on the three years we started maybe zero to that and yes they do very fast because recently you know some kind of the customer to increase the big data and they have bunch of data and also we have some customers that say they have the joining the 3D video they have to need to start the data that take a lot of the things to that yeah so okay so a good breadth of services there based on uh backup Dr and you also do so you do consultancy as well is that part of of the job there or
yeah uh for sure you know in China when we're doing the AI actually we need to consider about the the consultant services for that people always asking uh however if I want to back up the data at the end to the cloud can you help me to do the Consulting about the cloud structure and I think okay no problem we have the team to do that yeah so how big is the team or how many employees do you have currently we don't have that much bigger we have about over 30 people and we have the yeah we have about uh
15 to 17 engineers in the headquarter and we have have two companies in the China West one is in Chengdu and otherwise in London because their China is huge so we need to we needed some branch office in the in the of the China oh that's nice okay so you know you've got about 30 people roughly half of those are Engineers um and then how many data have you got multiple data centers that you're in for for your services mm-hmm yeah actually we have to uh have the data deployed in uh other China East and China nails and AWS North and AWS
West in China and also we have the data center hosting China Telecom we call it the China Telecom cloud and we have three of them and each of them have the the about a 203 PB storage already deployed and there are 30 or 40 has been used already yeah okay and that that stories like you mentioned is is it all Huawei storage yet normally we deploy in the Telecom data center we were using Huawei Appliance Hardware so that we're more legally and it's very easy to end the business in China government companies
you know sometimes they want to store the data in their local brand storage okay I can provide um and and did I say that you have have you got uh areas outside of China as well is there some data centers that you hold as a Target outside of China yes we have to adder and in that AWS hosting data center in Singapore and Hong Kong and now we're trying to deploy some bus services platform in the other Japan and that's the thing we have okay it's pretty cool so okay so you are branching out and and typically who are
the customers that would want to use your backup or Dr services in Japan in in Hong Kong or in Singapore is it is it customers outside of China or are they Chinese customers who have got presence in those particular regions yeah most of them is China there are two kind of a partner we call the China overt customer and another one is to have to say the foreign company in China the first one the kind of overseeing Lifetime game company they're doing the game yeah they want to attend their Market to the overseas so they want to run the server
in the maybe in the public cloud in Asia so they when they deploy the server in the maybe like the error or AWS in Japan or in the Hong Kong Singapore they need to do the protection so we provided protection and about the local data uh regulation the backup data should to be stored in the local data center so we're using the auto State maybe the other Japan or the Singapore and the Hong Kong data center team provided to protect their data and the book the second part is about the foreign company in China like the
Hitachi like the uh some company in China Japan company and the they have the factory in in China and sometimes they want to store the data in China locally and sometimes part of their products sold to the Asia area they want to deploy some application in the oversea so when they do that of course those the data need to store oversea so we have provided so that's the two part we use pretty awesome that um and then look the the fight I saw that in 2020 it had 500 terabytes so you've grown and then in 2022 1.5 and
now you said two points 2.7 petabytes that's that's big like that's significant I know I know worldwide numbers you know and that number is not insignificant so what's what's driving most of that core usage of your storage platforms and actually you know when we're doing the bus normally we think about our customer shooter from the SMB area because you know the the how to say the bit and the price we're using another story so when we're doing SMB we are trying to focus on the who has the most
quantity of the laptops and we found like the lawyer company and how to say some Service Company import export company we're trying to find them like okay okay we have you have about 100 PC you need to backup okay I can give you a backup and we have set out the package and let them need to move the data to our data center so after that we found it very cheap and the cost saving for solution for them to back up the data they have held them how to say their maybe other customer so we have more and more opportunities for that so that's
why to join the more and more customer to our sales team then we have the data to income yeah so you can you can be competitive on price within China probably more than what say other providers in different regions can be against the public clouds because the nature of the business so you can drive a a much cheaper dollars per gig price than others um what what is roughly how much is your storage at the moment out of interest uh one TP should be three sold in the IMB per year and there actually that's included maybe
the license oh okay so what does that work out to uh to u8 to US Dollars how much rough US Dollars uh US Dollars should be less than four hundred dollars okay less okay so and people still are very good on providing that that's awesome that's really good I I think that's a good price point to be at um okay let's talk about you mentioned Ai and you know 2023 wouldn't be a question without AI so how are you leveraging AI in your backup Technologies do you leverage it across the board or is it in in sub vaults
specifically that appliance that you talked about but how are you leveraging an AI into your services yeah so actually uh from last year we are considering to hire an entire uh we call it after sales service team and that that might be increase the number to 10. so 10 more people come in we have to do the adjuster for the services that will be a huge amount of money to pay and we started using the open AI platform and that and how to say we think about that is a good way to try so from last year we're trying the open egg and actually it's
from the error it's not the open the GPT sorry the we're just using the open AI directly from the header and we built out our own how to say the programming and the coding and we related to get the services our contents and the materials that also include our obviously the data sheet and let our customer to know easily to find if I want to backup the things on the sub word or backup of the functions on the on the bus how much should I pay so the AI will tell them how much should they pay and how many workloads they need okay like
the thing like the things you have in the Wind so so go ahead go keep going keep going so that's things that we need to do that like uh the chatting both before and the lazy year we integrated the checking board to our platform and we are trying to do that and that kind of thing in China we have the chat message like WeChat and then we moved anything to the WeChat and the people always like to to find some solution or finding some contents from the WeChat so we can give them the the portal from the WeChat they
can log in and check uh what is the best practice for backup the data already started data how cool is that because because I think people probably don't understand weight chat or probably haven't been exposed to it don't understand that it's a it's more than just a chat program it's a platform right and a lot of uh a lot of companies will write direct Integrations it's almost like an operating system in a way um so that's is that what you've done you've plugged into WeChat to create
write some sort of uh application on top of that to you know get your customers a little bit more connected yeah yeah that we did and the the the last thing we try to do is part of the orchestrating you know currently orchestrating is uh we may have a good like the recovery of Twitter they are doing a good job but you know sometimes we wanted to to notify and the the customer when they want to do the the recovery orchestrator since and the EI can provide how to say assistant for them let them to know what is the next
step and what is the the last step result is that working or not and let them to use that easily sometimes our customers they don't have very tough safe technical skills in hands and they need us to help but the orchestrator is just automatically tools if we spend too many many power on that that is not the cost anyway so that's why we are using the AI to do the assistant for them yeah right so you're driving efficiency like you said you've got 30 people in the company so using AI technology like that lets
you be a lot more efficient but also still provide a good service to your customers for what they want in terms of data protection um last question around uh ransomware so ransomware and cyber security obviously very very big I don't talk about it very much on on these shows because I think it gets talked to death but in the China Market what do you see in the China Market when it comes to ransomware attacks and cyber security is it happening as much in China as what is happening outside of China each other much happening it definitely
trust me definitely yeah that's the thing the story I just told you before when we want to move the data or the application publicly unclogged or even Data Center they were they don't have the sense to make their application or the hosting Services security did you think about the cost when you think about a cost you will you you might have been have the ransomware attack in the future days so we tell our customer a lot about this thing but they didn't care but one day they will find out back ever that we
have the reservoir attack could you help me to protect data so that's the thing that we have many times in the past years and just last week I have some customer calls they have the ransomware attack there you go so this is so it is happening and this is what you guys do you help customers recover from those attacks because you've got backup Services Dr Services you've got subvault that does the on-premises appliance stuff it's great um just uh the last question what's what's in the future for for backup now
what are you what are you planning what what um disruptions in the market are you looking to do to continue to grow your business okay so actually that's the pretty clear uh backup now is kind of the platform company we have integrated the engine to back up the data and provide the backup service and restore service for our client and so also we have to do some data regulation for the data control to data Appliance in the local market and sure that people can keep the data safely and there's the search is about
the most our Visionary is we will have our customer or the client to use their backup data to do this maybe develop like the big data like the data yes that's the things we need to learn to to know the value of the data so that's the things it's like kind of the platform company should do that's very powerful I think and it's a really good direction to go because unlocking that data as a as a data protection company you control the data and you control and there's a lot of power in that data that's
unlocked so well done for doing that hey let's finish up but before we before we finish I just want to give you an opportunity um in Chinese to to give a bit of a message out to people that might be listening to this about your company so give a little bit of a shout out to uh backup in Chinese for me yeah foreign good stuff hey Albert great to have you on and thanks for being on the show it's been really interesting I love the chat about the China Market love the chat about what you're doing in that market
and also worldwide getting some good recognition so just as a final note um if you're new here and would like to feature in future episodes please go to jtwgt.com hit the like And subscribe button a big thank you to Albert Foo and back up now for being on episode 71 of great things with great Tech thank you thank you
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