Redstor
In June 1998, we set out to build a business that could make money showing other businesses how to manage, store and protect their data.
Those early days were a real adventure and the culture of Redstor had been established. Fun, Learning, Integrity and Profit (FLIP) became the guiding principles then and still are now. Although we started off as an integrator, we were determined not to be regarded as a 'tin shifter' and wanted to be consultative, only getting involved in a project if we felt we could make a genuine difference to our clients and prospects.
We found that we were pretty good in this new market and found ourselves very busy installing the first Storage Area Networks (SANs) in the UK as well as other solutions around backup, archiving, mirroring and disaster recovery.
Our customers are large and small, many international and range from tier 2 Banks, Energy companies, Oil and Gas, Hi-Tech, Public Sector and Service Providers, all of whom are unified by common storage dilemmas. We have always worked with best of breed, global suppliers ensuring they are able to match the right solution to our clients. Over time, we began to realise that as the solutions became technically easier, the real costs our customers experienced was managing their data growth and having the in-house expertise to keep on top of all the latest developments.
That is why we evolved our business into managed services. We realised that for financial, operational or risk reasons it was not always in our customer's best interest to manage their own data storage. It was a natural extension for the business to look after the kit that had been sold by Redstor or other third parties and we now act as an outsourced storage administrator, managing and monitoring numerous companies. These clients are able to leverage Redstor's strong storage knowledge and practical experience gleaned from over a thousand storage projects in the last 12 years.
In 2005, we decided to build and manage our own storage and datacentres. The basic premise was that through economies of scale, we would offer on-line data storage services, as an option for customers that were willing to pass their data to a trusted partner. It was becoming obvious that not all IT tasks were best run 'in-house' and the world was already moving towards web-based or 'cloud' services.
Also in 2005, Redstor discovered the schools market. As we were building our first data centre, we were introduced to Warwickshire County Council's WELearn team, the organisation that provides IT services to Warwickshire schools. They had built a similar service to ours and it opened our eyes to the Local Authority (LA) sector. We put together a comprehensive plan of attack with the other 155 LAs in England and Wales as it transpired that no other Authority had started to think about offering cloud services. Schools were still backing up to tape, if at all, and found the whole experience painful and expensive. We came up with the Redstor Backup Service for Schools (RBUSS) and partnered with Service Providers – notably Local Authorities to roll out an online backup service to the schools. 5 years later we now have over 85 private and public service providers and somewhere between 12,000 and 14,000 schools who use the service. That's over half of the school children in the UK storing their data with Redstor!
Throughout our history, we have shown an ability to change and now we are seeing the greatest changes – both to the economy and also in the way IT services are delivered. Whilst Redstor's heritage has been to work with end users, we have now grown a Partner business that takes this experience and shows other trade IT organisations how to deliver their own online or 'cloud' services. Redstor now partner with over 130 service providers in the commercial and public sector space and this business is experiencing phenomenal growth. Fast forward to today, and the little service we started with has grown into an Online Backup and Storage Cloud Platform which now supports over 700TB’s of customer data.
The next phase in Redstor's growth will be driven by our ability to design and deliver cloud services that the market can see great value in. The growth over the next few years will be driven by our ability to partner with the right organisations and to deliver cost effective, recurring revenues and relevant services.
This new focus will allow Redstor to grow repeat incomes – of which 66% recur. Along the way, Redstor has won awards, such as the 2003 Times Fast Track awards (where we were number 37), influenced the market, had fun, made mistakes and made money every year except one (when the world went dotcom crazy and so did we!).
At the beginning of 2010, we purchased an old nightclub in Reading to convert into our office and a new data centre. This was seen as a great opportunity to invest in the long term future of the business.