Windows data migration company AutoVirt gets creative in sales, charitable about compensation and keeps cranking out products
Windows data migration start-up AutoVirt gets creative in sales, charitable about compensation and keeps cranking out products.
When AutoVirt officials visited our office last week, I declined a marketing slideshow and technical talk on the nitty gritty of their Windows data migration and other products (hey, I’ve already seen the video). Instead, I wanted to hear about how this 30-person start-up was dealing with the economy.
Turns out they’ve gotten pretty creative.
Among AutoVirt’s efforts:
* Holding boot camps for out-of-work sales and IT people and training them to sell the company’s products out of their homes on a commission-only basis.
* Supplementing employee compensation by allowing each worker to gift a copy of the company’s software to a charitable organization and educational institution of their choice.
* Offering a free inventory tool to attract potential customers to its medium-priced and more expensive flagship offerings.
To be clear, the Nashua, N.H., outfit says it’s doing just fine: it has formally introduced its first three products since February; it has paying customers (though is tightlipped about naming them); and as for its $8.5 million in venture funding, CEO Josh Klein says “we still have a good amount of that in the bank.”
But all that’s not to say AutoVirt is immune to the tight IT budgets and tough business market affecting just about every company these days. After all, despite partnering with big names such as EMC, Microsoft and VMware, it’s also competing with those companies to some extent, along with others such as Brocade and F5.
“Buying from a start-up is something people are wary of – they always are – but with budgets now limited they can’t afford to make mistakes,” Klein says, noting that AutoVirt focuses on companies generating $100 million to $1 billion in revenue and tends to deal more with IT directors than CIOs. “But if you have a good ROI story and can save people time with your product, you can smooth over a lot of those issues. Part of the challenge is that we’re offering people a fundamentally different way to handle their storage environment. It’s something they haven’t seen in a product that doesn’t cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, so it takes a leap of faith.”
AutoVirt’s flagship offering, the AutoMove data migration product, starts at $10,000, and the company claims each of its products can be downloaded and up-and-running inside of an hour. AutoVirt targets the file virtualization market, suggesting that it can do for your file servers and NAS devices what VMware did for your servers. Technically, AutoVirt has gone with an out-of-band approach to data migration that company officials argue is less obtrusive than in-band offerings.
CTO Klavs Landberg, who started the company in 2007, says he thinks every start-up – especially in this sort of economic climate – should make at least one free tool available to establish the company’s brand and show off its technology. That’s what AutoVirt does with its AutoMap diagnostic and discovery tool, which gives users an idea of file server utilization rates and how much they might save via virtualization and consolidation. “When you offer a free download, you’re inviting potential customers to see what kind of support you offer. That’s a way of being real to them,” Landberg says.
Creative sales approach
AutoVirt prides itself on engineering, and about two-thirds of its employees fall into that camp. On the sales front, AutoVirt relies largely on an inside sales team and Internet marketing. About a month ago AutoVirt started expanding its sales reach by training out-of-work IT sales people (found via its Web site, Craigslist, LinkedIn and its own resume pile) on its products through a half-day boot camp and setting them loose to sell AutoVirt’s products by phone from home on a commission-only basis, using a mix of their own contacts and those provided by AutoVirt. So far, the company has signed on about 20 such sales people and about three-quarters of them are being highly productive, generating leads and sales, and giving AutoVirt more of a national presence, Klein says.
“In normal times you wouldn’t be able to entice any high caliber sales people with a commission-only program like this, but because of these times there are so many people looking for something to make ends meet,” he says. Klein expects the best of the bunch could eventually be offered more permanent jobs, and noted that board members from the venture firms backing AutoVirt have expressed interest in having their other start-ups launch similar sales programs.
Growing customer familiarization with virtualization, mainly on the server front, has helped ease AutoVirt’s sales story. Though as Landberg notes, not everyone has had great experiences with server virtualization, so AutoVirt actually emphasizes the concepts of data migration and mobility.
Keeping employees happy
As for ensuring its employees are satisfied, AutoVirt has started to allow each worker to designate a charity and educational institution of choice to receive a free copy of the company’s software if they so wish. “In some cases this amounts to thousands of dollars in gifts,” says Klein, who joined AutoVirt late last year after serving as GlassHouse Technologies’ president and COO. “Employees are getting a kick out of this.”
Culturally, Landberg says AutoVirt has attempted to put together an engineering team focused on defect-free products. “We’ve had test automation in place since Day 1,” he says. The managers have also tried to keep the company’s organization pretty flat: Landberg and Klein buy lunch for the crew every Monday, give a detailed update on everything from products to customers to business, and then bus the tables at the end.
As for where AutoVirt goes from here, the company is getting ready to introduce a new version of AutoMove that enables customers to better exploit the product’s existing virtualization and automation engines, which include job management and exception-handling systems. This should allow customers to use the product for archiving, disaster recovery and other applications, Landberg says.
AutoVirt is also starting to angle to sell its products based on what they can do for customers from an energy-savings perspective. The argument goes that more efficient storage environments are ones that don’t rely on a bunch of servers running at 20% or 30% capacity – exactly the issue AutoVirt addresses. “It’s hard to find even midsize shops that don’t have space and power issues,” Klein says.
