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27 November 2018

Naming your baby

The big day is fast approaching. Your palms are starting to sweat, and the nerves are intensifying. You’ve not felt like this since the birth of your business.

It’s now time to launch your first service offering. The pure reseller days, when “name that product” was someone else’s responsibility are officially over.

The big question is: what do you call your new service?

Your first port of call is the trusted Thesaurus where you’re hoping to be inspired.  Or maybe, you go for a walk, or get high – anything to ignite that creative spark.

You convince yourself that the name isn’t that important and that it’s all about feeling the quality.  Instead, you’re left thinking: who am I trying to kid!

A strong, memorable name will help position your product or service. It provides you with the platform to inform your audience what it can do for them and what it stands for. Most importantly, it helps to differentiate you from the competition. It’s the first step, but only a step, in building a brand.

A recent baptism

When looking for a name for its new data availability service, the team at UK-based Predatar partner Silverstring, asked for my advice.  Establishing a foothold in an already crowded market was going to be no mean feat so we needed to think outside the box.  We focused on what was important to the clients which was centred around not just protecting their data, but helping them to get more value from the data. Cost reduction was also high on the list of requirements so all in all, a challenging brief. After much discussion with the creative juices well and truly flowing, we agreed on the name Alchemis Protect™, the concept of turning legacy data assets into liquid gold, whilst ensuring clients can sleep easy knowing their data is protected.

Here are my top 6 tips when naming your product or service:

  1. Do you put your house name on the product?

That depends on whether you called your son “Junior” or “the third”. If you didn’t, we recommend originality unless your company does just one thing – then it’s ok.  It’s also important not to confuse company with product. People buy products and services first. If they like the product then they fall in love with the company, not the other way around.

  1. Avoid similarity with existing products in your space.

Imitation is great if you want to be a “me 2” kind of brand and I’m sure your competition will be flattered.  This kind of approach only serves to reinforce the fact that someone else got their first so try not to ‘copy’.  Be different – don’t be afraid to step out of your comfort zone and go with something completely unique.

  1. Avoid Abbreviations.

Unless you’re IBM, FBI or JFK. IBM could do it because they were already well known. JFK was not called JFK until after he became president. If your product is new, people need to know what it is. An abbreviated name won’t help.

  1. Sound and length.

In the search to be descriptive, we first explore the written word so it’s easy to overlook how it will sound. Don’t worry, your salespeople will soon tell you if it sounds terrible. Names with too many syllables are also a no-no. Guess what happens next? It gets abbreviated.

  1. Naming a service vs. naming a product.

People think about what a product is and does. For a service, try to focus on what it can do for your prospect. This requires you to think like a customer and ignore the oh-so-amazing patent you filed.  The focus needs to be on benefits.

  1. Think Global.

Naming your service “Chicago Cloud Backup” is great if you want to dominate in that city but it won’t do anything for your sales effort in Europe.

Finally, your words must match reality. Don’t over promise with a name your operation can’t deliver on.

Good luck with the launch of your new service.

Happy name hunting!

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Predatar recovery assurance

09 November 2018

Learning machines go forward with backup

In the future, for companies to have confidence in their backup systems, assistance from machines will be essential.

According to McAfee and Brynjolfsson1, the likelihood of any job being automated can be understood by asking the 4Ds; is the job dull, dangerous, dirty or dear? Not sure about dirty or dangerous but people tell me Backup is dull, and it can be expensive to operate.

Our ability to keep pace is the problem. Keeping data protected is a growing challenge as the volume and variety of data increases. And if data is the new oil, it’s also becoming more of an imperative. Backup and Recovery best practices move slowly from company to company, often only when skilled engineers move jobs. In ecological terms this is the equivalent of DNA mutation through procreation; a very slow evolution.

New data points from IoT and the proliferation of cloud computing models all point to data protection becoming a bigger challenge. With increasing regulation and ever more sophisticated malware attacks, we need to accelerate this evolution to keep up in the data protection arms race. Hackers are using artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to steal your, or your customers’ data, it’s time you considered it too.

Applications of AI in Data Protection

Machine learning is different from regular programming. Rather than developers writing explicit code to perform some computation or task, a machine learning application can use the data to create models.

One use case exploited by the most successful service providers, is improving customer satisfaction. An AI powered customer service chatbot can support and scale business operations.

Predictive analytics can help answer the question of what will happen in the future based on what is happening now. This technology can be used to identify patterns of backup failures, helping predict when the next one will occur.

How to get the best from AI?

Architect your platform for learning

For the successful adoption of AI in data protection, we believe that the learning platform must be separated from the underlying applications. Developers must have access to the metadata, so they can ask the questions to turn dumb backup data into smart insights. Large enterprises typically use multiple backup tools, so having your AI platform out-of-band will also create more training data for machine learning.

Develop an open mindset

A requirement for the successful adoption of AI in data protection is a large ecosystem. We believe the service provider and channel community will create the future of AI innovation in data protection. Cloud service providers, as they scale, will turn to AI to solve the toughest problems in backup and recovery. The most successful AI platforms will need to embrace the channel ecosystem.

In the middle ages in London, England, merchants and craftsmen formed Livery companies to protect themselves and their customers. Highly skilled artisans, such as the Leather Sellers or Merchant Taylors, even though competitors, would band together to gain network effects. Today, despite a global communications revolution, clusters still exist. Hollywood is where movie makers congregate, Silicon Valley for tech start-ups, and in Oxfordshire, UK, there exists a hub for Formula One racing teams.

Applying the same logic to today’s worldwide digital age, just as economies prosper when trade is unrestricted, AI in data protection will flourish when companies provide open architectures; fostering innovation across a wide ecosystem.

What happens next?

Our final belief is that we will see AI being deployed to help vendors and consumers co-create more personalised and effective solutions. An out-of-band AI platform is a co-creation development platform; bringing the makers much more insight into how their products are actually used.

We expect to see in the coming years a new wave of innovation in data protection as AI bridges the knowledge gap between product manufacturers and their customers.

1 Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson 2017

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