The vendor will nonetheless face some stiff competition this side of the Atlantic and is up against photo-sharing sites such as Picasa and Flickr as well as online backup vendors Carbonite and Mozy, which was bought by EMC for $76 million last year.
Unlike Carbonite and Mozy, however, Steek will not sell its offerings direct to consumers and businesses, preferring instead to tap into service providers.
If the ISPs dont want to be eaten by Google, they need to address new services, and we can provide services for them, says Gobet, adding that the ISP model is also more cost-effective for Steek. Having a [consumer] brand is a lot of money, and the money we have is not to develop a consumer brand, its to deliver the right solution to ISPs.
Steek was founded (as Agematis) in 2002 by Christophe Camborde, Yannick Lacastaigneratte, and Arnaud Roudsovsky, three former IT execs at French retail giant Carrefour. Camborde now serves as the Steek CEO, with Lacastaigneratte and Roudsovsky serving as the startups COO and R&D director, respectively.
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