After working on “data backup and archiving for over a decade”, Johan Holder “saw that organisations were generating more and more data without devising a clear plan to manage it all. Data management strategies weren’t keeping pace with the rate of data growth and businesses were just throwing money and disks at the problem instead of approaching it intelligently. The more data they stored, the less they understood what was valuable and what was useless.”So, Johan decided to start Kazoup with Radek Dymacz “to help organisations take back control of their unstructured file data, better understand it and find the value within it.” Today, Johan is the CEO of Kazoup and focusses on the commercial and marketing drive, while Radek works as the CTO with a focus on the technology development and future roadmap of Kazoup.
Johan wants to set the bar higher for development and IT in general. He says, “We challenge ourselves to make a real difference in our clients’ business by creating great products and providing great service. There’s no smoke and mirrors with Kazoup and there never will be. You don’t need them when you’re providing a clearly valuable service.”
Kazoup is a “DIY” solution to analyse unstructured file data. It can be downloaded from the website www.kazoup.com as a virtual machine appliance. It is easy to install and requires no professional services consultancy to set up and get going. It installs and configures in less than half an hour. Documentation is available online and in-app support is provided by Kazoup to answer questions as they arise.
Kazoup puts you back in control of your unstructured file data. It’s about visibility. “We help businesses search through every file in their environment – usually millions of them – and analyse the results to discover if they’re useful or not. Then, we mirror or archive the old and unused stuff with simple and easy automation to the cloud.” the founders tell us. Kazoup’s new approach has already earned recognition from Gartner in their Market Guide for “File Analysis Software Report”.
Kazoup is a single product with three distinct features – Search, File Analysis and Archive. It “brings your data to life with clear and beautiful analytics and interactive charting. With Kazoup, you can see your unstructured data growth visualised in real-time and make better decisions about how to manage it.” Kazoup then delivers “automated, encrypted and compliant archiving to cheap, secure cloud-based object storage. Simple and fast search enables users to recover data directly from AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, Microsoft Azure Blob Storage or any other chosen cloud storage provider.” In effect, this means that live storage and the archive are presented as one integrated environment to users, who can then search through the file content and meta data at blistering speeds, both locally and archived. You find the useful knowledge inside your documents and put the right information back in front of your users.
Kazoup’s original focus was archiving. “We wanted to create a tool to help organisations leverage cloud object storage to offload old un-accessed data from expensive local storage to cheap redundant object storage in cloud like AWS Google Storage Azure with onsite encryption and easy access for end users.” says Johan. He adds, “We adopted a basic-but-beautiful approach when creating software. We’ve prioritised the user experience the whole way through, and we’ve now got beautiful analytics and search functions to show customers where their data is and who is accessing it. This helps them identify patterns so they can choose what data they want to archive.”
The biggest “value proposition” for Kazoup’s customers is actually helping them understand what data they have, where it is stored, how it’s accessed and how the data is growing. This helps them to plan better and take better decisions. Kazoup wants to “help triage the cloud when intelligence, not just move the dark data problem to the cloud.”
The team at Kazoup believes in “continuous development and continuously improving and updating software automatically.” You can think about it as SaaS behind your corporate network. John says, “It’s secure because all the information – both your data and the analytics about it – runs in your environment. You own everything without incurring any management overhead, because the software updates itself and we resolve any issues. We have developers constantly reacting to our client feedback and improving the software based on clients requirements.”
Kazoup is also unique in its combination of analytics, search and archiving with ‘envelope’ encryption, all of which allows customers to use their own object storage or any cloud-based storage provider of their choice. One of the most innovative benefits for customers is that end users can search through archives to find data as if it is on premises and can then restore from an archive without having to go to IT to perform the restore.
“Money and people are our biggest challenges, as they tend to be with startup i.e, securing funds to invest in development and finding great developers to help us make this happen” says Johan.
There are many companies out there doing analytics, archive and search – not necessarily all in one complete technology. Kazoup was recently mentioned in Market Guide for File Analysis Software, Alan Dayley, et. al, 23 September 2014, which has helped it to identify its competitors that include Apatare, IBM – StoredIQ, EMC, Varonis, Symantec, CommVault, Sonian, Mimecast, Acaveo, Avepoint, BeyondRecognition, Bloomberg, Condrey, Covertix, Dataglobal, Equivio, Hisoftware, HP – Controlpoint, Imperva, Novell, Nuix, Proofpoint, Steathbits, Watchdox, Zylab, Datagravity.
Right now Kazoup is in public beta, but its official launch is “just around the corner”. “We are implementing new beautiful designs, a personal obsession of Radek, and integrating more data sources like public file store providers such as One Drive and Box.” John tells us. He adds, “One thing that’s guiding our roadmap is the changing role of file servers. Put simply, file servers as we know them today have a limited life span. Users don’t need the hardware, they just need a service to store and access files from anywhere and any device. That’s why we’re focusing on supporting more object storage archive endpoints like Azure. “
Kazoup is targeting UK, Europe and USA as the initial markets, with plans to grow into the Asia- Pacific and South American market. The technology integrates with global public cloud providers like AWS, Azure and Google, and the software deploys from any location, so the service is available today from any global location. Kazoup has had a small angel investment from Databarracks and is looking to expand its development team in 2015 and have a marketing push in UK, Europe and USA. There are discussions going on with venture capitalists regarding funding.
You can see Kazoup’s “short technology roadmap” here – http://www.kazoup.com/docs/roadmap.html and it has also defined long term roadmap internally.
StartupDope’s readers can quote the coupon name STARTUPDOPE in Kazoup’s in app customer support application and can avail 50% discount for 1 year of software subscription.
