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FalconStor is poised to increase penetration into Asian markets it currently operates in even as it fleshes out Bluestone, its vision for service-oriented data protection.

For a start, FalconStor is moving its Asia Pacific headquarters to Singapore from Taichung in Taiwan. The company has appointed industry veteran Suresh Nair as its general manager and vice president for Asia Pacific.

 
"We're investing in the management of the Asia Pacific region and a more substantial presence serving the MNCs with operations in Singapore," said FalconStor's president and CEO Jim McNiel. "There is a substantial opportunity to improve our penetration in the countries we operate in. China is the number 2 economy in the world. We're not collecting $100m in revenue from there yet and we'd like to do that. So, we're going to invest heavily in the regions we're already in.

"One-third of our revenues come from Asia but Asia is almost 50% of our company's operations. Asia is growing faster than US and Europe. We've enjoyed a CAGR in Asia of 60% for the past three years. The market is growing at 10% and I think we can grow 4 to 5 times that."

The region's growth potential has spurred the company, whose role in cloud computing is focused on data in motion, to add headcount in both Singapore and Taichung, where it is increasing its support capabilities as well as its development and quality assurance operations. Beijing and Shanghai are the company's other development bases in the region.

One major R&D initiative is its Bluestone project, which envisions a single pane of glass from which enterprises can control all aspects of data-in-motion lifecycle with different forms of protection.

RecoverTrac, an automated disaster recovery (DR) solution for both physical and virtual environments, is the first Bluestone solution to be released. In Q1 of next year, the company will introduce a "self-aware system that understands what's going on in the IT environment, raises a flag if something changes and is able to test its own DR processes in an automated way," said McNiel.

"Today, business continuity/ disaster recovery (BC/DR) is about 30% automated and about 70% manual labor," he added. "Our goal is to turn that around and get to a point where it is 80% automated and 20% labor. Automation is important because only perhaps 10% of organizations would have performed a DR test in the last six months and maybe 10% of those would have had a successful outcome."

The challenge for enterprises is that IT environments change constantly. So, an ideal DR solution should be able to connect to the environment, discover what's in there, configure the protection policy and then protect that environment without a whole lot of user intervention.

"Bluestone is the vision of delivering service-oriented data protection that is highly available, meaning no single point of failure in the system because if it's not always up, you're not backing up," said McNiel. "Some data needs to be available all the time and other data, you can back up once a day.

"You also want to use the right kind of storage for the right kind of data and migrate storage to less expensive media as it becomes less valuable. The direction of the company is to automate the [BC/DR] process by policy so you can dictate tiering based on age of data, value of data or the service associated with it."

FalconStor, being a relatively lean global organization with 500 employees worldwide, will sell its solutions by leveraging the 5,000 professionals employed by its channel partners. "Globally, the BC/DR business is a US$16 billion software business, but if you add hardware and services, it's a $39 billion business," McNiel said. "Our partners get to participate in margins in all three categories, especially in the services area, which is predominantly all profit."

The company is tailoring its global Partner Choice program for the Asia Pacific and along with it, a partner certification program.