OwnBackup is not exclusively focused on the Salesforce platform, but they are the leader on the platform, and it provides a big chunk of their revenues.

SAN FRANCISCO — SaaS backup and recovery vendor OwnBackup has announced a major new release of  their offering. The new functionality includes the ability of users to generate their own encryption keys, and API accessibility to allow users to active OwnBackup services from apps.

OwnBackup has been around since 2015, although the product actually dates from 2012, as it was owned by another company, which is now connected to OwnBackup. OwnBackup’s CEO is Sam Gutmann, the founder of Intronis  [now Barracuda MSP], who was Intronis’ CEO until 2010.

OwnBackup is built on the Salesforce platform, and while they are not exclusive to that platform, the company plays a critical role in their business.

“We do support other platforms, not just Salesforce, but Salesforce is a very important partner for us,” said Ori Yankelev, OwnBackup’s VP of Sales — who also came through Intronis. “We are the leader in Salesforce backup and recovery. Salesforce has been a very good partner to us, and they have invested in us. A significant portion of our revenues comes from Salesforce customers.”

Similarly, while not all of OwnBackup’s customers are enterprise, the enterprise is their go-to-market focus.

“In terms of who we build for, it’s very much the enterprise,” Yankelev said. “We aim to offer the best quality feature set for the price.”

OwnBackup does have channel partners, and their Web Site has a partner application section, but the company is still mainly in the direct selling stage.

“We are primarily direct, and haven’t really gone after the channel yet,” Yankelev said. “We have a handful of resellers, mainly system integrators, but it’s not a core part of our go-to-market at the moment. Long term, there is certainly the potential for it, and both Sam and myself came from that ecosystem. Once we feel we are ready to expand there, we know what we need to do to make that happen.”

This in OwnBackup’s Winter’18 release, which gives the impression that they have fairly infrequent seasonal releases, but that’s not the case.

“We have a new release about once a month, but not all are major releases,” Yankelev said. “The Spring ‘17 release was the last major one to get its own branding, and this is a major one as well.”

Yankelev said that this release has a major platform upgrade to speed up performance.

“We work with more large clients than ever, and so we need to back up faster than ever,” he stated.

There are, in addition, a number of significant new features, beginning with advanced key management.

“This is basically a ‘bring your own key option,” Yankelev said. “Some customers want more control over security, and with this we give them the ability to generate their own encryption keys. Our standard offering is that we encrypt, and we manage the encryption. We expect that will remain the most common way. However, some customers, like very large banks, financial services, and insurance, have asked us for that option. It’s a subset of the market, but it is a significant one.”

The other major new feature is the ability to activate OwnBackup services automatically from apps.

“This is a huge feature which customers have been asking for,” Yankelev said. “It will allow for a more flexible use of the software, such as using our logs to run backup on the fly. The APIs make things much more flexible.”

Search functionality has also been upgraded.

“There is now a much more advanced find capability,” Yankelev said. “The new enhanced search will search contents of attachments, and can search historical documents as well.

The reporting capabilities have been enhanced too.

“The new enterprise reports feature will give clients a set of reports from a compliance perspective,” Yankelev noted. “There’s already a lot of transparency in the application, but this will make it easier.”