Today, Liquid Telecom, launched an enterprise data storage, cloud storage and file sharing service powered by Code 42‘s CrashPlan and SharePlan technology. Launching first in Zimbabwe and then to be expanded to other countries where Liquid has operations the services is branded CrashPlan Africa and SharePlan Africa.
Essentially, large enterprises for whom security of their files is a big deal (banks, governments and such) can use the service to either host a private cloud at their premises or use Liquid Telecom’s Cloud storage.
As for the comparison with services like Dropbox, Box and other such. CrashPlan Africa is enterprise first and built to put the security in the hands of the tech department, hence the option to have a private cloud. Appparently companies like Adobe, Expedia, Salesforce, Uber use it. Dropbox, Google Drive etc… on the other started as consumer products and are being adapted to enterprise. Plus they insist on hosting the data and this is a deal breaker to companies that prefer to not have their data in the security and privacy nightmare that is America – well, the internet.
But even if the consumer cum enterprise storage solutions were competition, in Africa only a few large companies have migrated to cloud storage and management so the real competition to CrashPlan Africa would still be the traditional “every laptop has it’s data and if stolen the world stops” alternative. One platform that would come close though is Microsoft’s SharePoint if only it wasn’t the unusable mess I remember it to be from my Sys Admin days back inn 2008.
On pricing, here’s what’s on offer:
I have no idea what the $13,000 p.a. is for and my attempts to get an answer from either Liquid Telecom or ZOL this past hour hasn’t yielded anything. An update later when we get it.
Here’s an update from Anthony Somerset, the Technical Lead on the Crashplan Africa project:
Basically at the enterprise level there is no requirement to use the Liquid Cloud storage option – you really can do all that yourself if you want to so that’s why we decouple the storage from the software license but at enterprise level you basically pay for the license and then add the storage “license” if you don’t want to run your own storage servers for the service. For enterprise there’s a minimum 100 user commit and the pricing is:
- $65 per user per year for the software
- $65 per user per year for unlimited Liquid Cloud Storage,
which at the minimum commit would work out at $13k per year for the 100 seats.The home and biz packages will be bundled so there’s no decoupling of the license from the storage cost because there you will be using the Liquid Cloud Storage regardless – our pricing is still being worked on for those segments of the market but should be available very soon.
More details about the platform in the video below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pT2QBMLwVzs
Note. If you can’t access the Code 42 website that’s apparently coz they won’t have Zimbabwean IP addresses connecting, so Tor‘s your friend.
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Limbikani, what do all those acronyms mean?
part of why the pricing was confusing. We’ve posted an update and you don’t need to understand the acronyms anymore to understand pricing
Limbikani to give you some insight on the pricing on the slide above:
$65 per user per year for a single license to use the software (the server software is free if you want to do it yourself storage wise)
then if you need/want the Liquid Hosted Storage option its another $65 per user per year for basically unlimited storage.
Those are enterprise options though hence the 100 seat minimum commit which would cost about $13k a year at that level
There are Much more Home and Small business user friendly packages coming soon so its not all just for the big enterprises!
My friend if you dont know about sharepoint please do not contaminate your posts with unstantiatable experiences from 7 years ago. Sharepoint is now on ver 2013 and 2016 is coming up. It is an enterprise application requiring significant investment in resources, training, planning and hardware to use fully. If you do not have any of these, just like any other significant enterprise grade application you will be wasting your time. Its taking the pilot of Cessna to fly new Jumbo Airbus without significant retraining – a crash will be the almost certain result.
Hi experience of Sharepoint at that time was consistent with my experience and to some extents still is (non-windows device support anyone?) so its not an unfair point – but your point about sharepoint requiring significant investment is valid as it is a complicated beast and not something as easy to setup in comparison to crashplan and shareplan as well as not being pleasant if you have a multi-os environment with Mac and Linux flying around as well as windows.
Note. If you can’t access the Code 42 website that’s apparently coz they won’t have Zimbabwean IP addresses connecting,
This statement does not translate into this one
Launching first in Zimbabwe and then to be expanded to other countries where Liquid has operations the services is branded CrashPlan Africa and SharePlan Africa.
How is it launching first in Zim when we cannot access it without going round like Tor and annonymous web surfing?
Try http://www.crashplanafrica.com 😉
Code 42 is an American Company.