Chander Kant, CEO and a founder of Zmanda, is hoping one thing from this recession continues: the opening of closed mindsets and cultures. As the CEO of Zmanda, the leader in open source backup and recovery software, he says mindset and culture are sometimes the barriers when it comes to adoption of open source backup vis-à-vis enterprise backup. This, he says, is despite the fact that over the past few years, the two have come on par in terms of features.
“Mindsets take a significant beating when things are down,” says Chander, and this recession has been one such occasion. So much so that some companies who Zmanda never thought of as part of its prospective customer list, in the short term, are signing up with the company all on their own.

“Difficult times call for innovative solutions. A large retailer who we would never have thought would be our customer in the near term logged onto our website recently, and filled in the contact sales form, and then purchased our product within two weeks,” he notes. Though the retailer in question bought the product for a specific project and not all of its operations, it is an encouraging sign.

“The project did not have the money to go for a Symantec backup product, and we had all the features they needed at a fraction of the cost, so they opted for us,” says Chander. So as companies keep feeling the heat, more unlikely clients will come Zmanda’s way.

In fact, when the economy hit its recent low in Q4 of last year, Zmanda witnessed a 60% increase in downloads of its solutions. As compared to a typical monthly 10,000 downloads of its free community solution from its website, the number of downloads shot up in Q4 to more than 16,000 per month.

Backup is not optional. Businesses of every size need it. Overall, more and more IT managers are looking at open source as a significant vehicle to dramatically reduce their costs. And when they do so, Zmanda profits the most, since it is the leader in open source backup solutions, says Chander.