At PCFort, a dollar gets your customers in the door. The company has a low entry level price designed to appeal to ISPs and to ISPs' residential and SOHO customers.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [April 21, 2005]

The folks at Guildford, Surrey, UK-based DataFort have long sold backup to big business, but at the end of last year realized that ISPs could be a valuable channel in the search for small business customers.

To that end, the company launched its PCFort high frills low cost service at ISPCON in Fall 2004 in a vendor session (note to self, attend more vendor sessions in May).

PCFort entry level pricing is low: $0.99 per month for 250 MB of backup. "We're trying to get people to bundle PCFort with broadband service," explains Marcie Terman, U.S.-based director of business development for PCFort.

"We felt ISPs could avoid charging customers for the first 250 MB of space and allow customers to pay for upgrades."

Of course, the service offers more than just space on a remote hard drive. "It's an all singing, all dancing backup service," explains Terman.

When the user signs up, they choose a user name and password. The software suggests other user names if the preferred one is taken. The software then delivers a preconfigured client with the user name and password on it.

"95 to 96 percent of our customer service calls were clients who had set up an account but could not get it to work," explains Terman. So the company built its own foolproof (or fool-proof) service.

The client software on the computer is instructed by the user what it should back up. The user can specify or exclude file types, directories, and so on. "You could choose to back up all MS Word .docs, to never backup movies, and to backup everything in the "My Documents" folder, for example," says Terman.

The company knows what its target user base is. "We're targeting home business and residential users. I've been doing interviews with analysts—they're interviewing me but I learn from them—and they said nobody's taking care of SOHO backup."

A specific subsegment of residential users is targeted. "We also believe concerned consumers will be interested in our service. The alternative is a CD writer with CDs. We offer incremental backup and instantly place the backup off site."

Co-marketing
The company values its ISP customers as an integrated part of its U.S. marketing efforts. PCFort is building marketing materials for its ISP partners. "We're working on items like an e-mail advertisement ISPs can put their own details in, suggestions for a website, and for promotions," explains Terman. "We're also asking ISPs to talk to local publications and we're working with our PR firm, Trylon, to help ISPs get noticed."

The parent company is also looking for large ISP partners. One its PCFort subsidiary is established in the U.S., the company plans to offer its DataFort product (for larger companies), but in order to do so it will need long term relationships with about six colocation centers across the nation. "If I have half a terabyte backed up, I need to be able to have engineers grab the servers and bring them to the data recovery site. This is not necessary for the PCFort service because of the quantity of data involved."

Terman says this will be a good deal for large ISPs. "We're going to want to have relationships. It will be a very sweet deal in terms of low margins. We'll handle the building of the servers."

ISP-Planet has always said that strong companies looking for a foothold in what is still the world's largest data market, the U.S., make good partners for local and regional ISPs. Large companies with solid products that would usually not partner with even the most well established regional ISP might consider a partnership.

—End