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KeepITsafe set to top €1million turnover
14 June 2009 By Dick O’Brien
Online backup provider KeepITsafe says it is on target to break the €1 million mark in turnover this year with the acquisition of a number of new customers.
Founder and chief executive Eoin Blacklock said that after recording €800,000 in revenues last year and €600,000 in 2007, the company now appeared to be on track to record similar growth this year. KeepITsafe had been operating in a very competitive environment since 2005, he said, but appeared to have turned a corner in terms of scale this year.
Blacklock explained that the company was now operating in the wholesale market, and was selling space and services to several rival online backup providers.
In a market where most services are sold by resellers, Blacklock said that the company’s size was now allowing it to win customers at a high rate. In some cases, resellers were migrating their entire customer base to the company.
KeepITsafe was founded in 2003 by Blacklock and cofounder and technical director Jonathan Crowe in 2003,while the pair were still students at Trinity College.
Originally, the service was run on a campus server. By the time the pair had graduated,50 businesses in the greater Dublin area were clients of the company and they decided to develop it as a full commercial enterprise, moving their servers into a data centre.
The company has been entirely self-financed since its inception and Blacklock said that the company had been profitable since day one.
‘‘We really bootstrapped it," he said. ‘‘It is an easy business to grow and, as we acquired more customers, it was just a case of buying more server space and increasing our co-location costs."
The company now has approximately 1,400 clients on its books and works with about 120 partners. Blacklock said that while the perception might be that the service was pitched at the SME market, the company had been acquiring a large number of corporate clients of late. These include CPL Recruitment, Eircom, the HSE and a number of other government bodies.
The average customer is now backing up between 50Gb and 60Gb of data, which was up from around 5Gb in 2004. The increase in the amount being backed up was mainly due to digital media and large e-mail attachments being stored. ‘‘Funnily enough, the most important data usually takes up the least amount of space,’’ Blacklock said.
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