Putting the CEO in Decho

Harel,

Voice from the past - Robert Brown former Director of Sales & Marketing for Philips. Remember the Velo and Nino and working with Tony Fadel and I? I have been working on a number of SAS/ CRM mobile enterprise/ cloud computing initiatives in the financial services/ banking areas and would love to compare notes about Decho and my company PMAC.

eMail when you have a moment in this busy time of year. Hope all is well.

I am on LinkedIn as well.

Kind Regards,

Robert Brown
949-294-8232

Hello Harel,

Congratulations on your new post.  I’ve been following Decho and Mozy for some time, but wasn’t sure who best to contact to open a conversation.

I’m very interested in the marketing approach for Decho (and Mozy), especially since it’s at the nexus of B2B and consumer marketing.  Getting consumers to adopt online storage, backup, and recovery is an area in which we have experience and a successful track record, and I would be happy to share our learnings with you. 

A couple of years ago, we created The Institute for Backup Trauma, starring John Cleese (backuptrauma.com), a viral campaign which received well over a million views within a few months of release, doubled the sales of our client LiveVault, and led to their sale of the company to Iron Mountain within a year. 

I’ve seen the video ads for Mozy, and while I enjoyed them, I see the pain point as a bit different than what’s in those pieces.  Their focus is on the fear of having one’s laptop destroyed, which is in actuality kind of rare.  What’s more common - and more terrifying - it turning on your PC or laptop and having your hard drive die, or simply losing access to a critical document, photo, or other piece of data.  That’s a different story, and it’s one we’ve had great success telling - in a meaningful (and hilarious) way.  If you’d like to know more, the campaign was featured in Business Week’s CEO Guide to Online Video:
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/07/01/0116_viralvideo/index_01.htm
There’s also a customer success story on our site at captainsofindustry.com.
I hope you find this of value - and I would welcome the chance to speak further if it’s of interest to you.

Regards,

Fred Surr
Captains Of Industry
617-725-1959

Harel,

Congratulations on your new career endeavour. Now I can use Deco’s Mozy to back up all those embarassing video clips I had taken over the years during our Holiday dinners.

Wishing you a successful and fulfilling tenure at EMC.

Best,

Haim and Family

Mr. Kodesh,

Congratulations on your new position with Decho.  I am a paying MozyHome customer, and consistently recommend Mozy to my friends and family.

The reason I am writing is to let you know that Mozy needs some very serious help in Customer Service/Technical Support.  Tech support is consistently slow to respond to emails (3-4 days), and generally (but not always) the quality of the responses are poor.  I have little confidence in those providing the support.

Within the last week, I needed some real technical support due to a “Backend server error” I keep getting from Mozy, which prevents my backup from running.  A few days ago, I moved my data to a new computer.  I followed the instructions from Mozy tech support about migrating Mozy from my old to new machine (so that the new machine gets associated with my Mozy account, and my data will be re-pathed without having to upload 100GB of data again).  Unfortunately, after following these instructions my backups failed immediately.  I contacted tech support via email, and a few days later still had no response.  A couple days ago I contacted Mozy tech support via IM (Liveperson); that was just slightly more helpful, but after over one hour of chat time, the result is I just have to wait 24 hrs and see what happens on the Mozy server.

Well, I have waited, I am still getting the error, and my backups have not run for almost 6 days now.

I am not posting this to bash Mozy; I want Mozy to succeed, I like the service.  BUT, it needs to work and good CS/TS is essential.  And I am not alone… if you search the web you will find many stories like mine related to Mozy CS/TS.

This is EXTREMELY frustrating.  I sincerely hope improving technical support is a top priority for you at Decho.  I am a career software engineer, and very familiar with application development and technical support; if I can help in any way, I would be happy to.  Technical support needs to improve, and quickly. I cannot seem to get this problem solved, nor any reasonable response from Mozy, which is why I am posting to your new blog.  I am desperate.

I, like many, use Mozy for peace of mind, and if I don’t have that with Mozy I need to find another service where I do.

Best Wishes and Happy Holidays.

Mr. Kodesh,

As your first assignment, I need you to fix Mozypro’s MX record.  Mozypro’s MX record is screwed up with a cuda.decho.com entry going to 0.0.0.0.  It’s only been messed up for a month.  Good luck!

Welcome to Decho Mr. Kodesh.  I came across your posting while searching the Mozy web site for information about the product.

I’d like to offer my two-cents worth after having spent many hours of this day reviewing your site and posts and blogs by others regarding their experiences with Mozy.

Your site, while nicely laid out, isn’t quite as informative as I think it could or should be.  A flash demonstration of how Mozy works (both the backup upload as well as the restore options) would be quite useful.  I think it particularly important since one of your restore options depends upon the customer to download Zip files, which may be something many potential customers no knowing about.

Second, during my research today I came across an awful lot of web sites whereby some author was complaining about the Mozy restore process.  Many of these posts were older (2007), but the number of them (and the subsequent comments by others with similar problems) has caused no small amount of concern for me regarding your product.

I know and understand that any consumer electronic or software will undoubtedly garner its number of detractors.  And I endeavor to remember that for every person who has problems there are likely hundreds or thousands who do not.  But the part that concerns me is that many of the writers appear to have no small amount of technical prowess and are not ignorant to the ways of computing. 

While I consider my decision to purchase Mozy I hope you find your time with Mozy to be productive, profitable and enriching.

Congratulations on your new role.  Good luck in your efforts.  There is a lot of opportunity in the cloud.  It will be interesting to see where Decho can take the broader industry.

Hello and congrats.
I’m an Italian IT consultant interested and wanna-be reseller of Mozy pro from my little, insignificant (and far from being completed) website.

Hope you keep the price fixed and extend some interesting deals for business affiliates!
I disagree with Mr. Mark’s Alfson (Flash) suggestion: It’s encumbered and still there is not full Apple OS X performance.

Instead why don’t you start thinking about an online backup solution for the many Linux-powered servers around the web? Do you fear the data load?

I have also another source of concern:
What will happen to my data, once it is inside your servers? Will you be able to access it?
Make it bolder/clearer you shouldn’t/won’t access it!

And…where the heck are your Data Centers? Ain’t it something you should be proud of?

finally…sure man, I can of course “# Run a cron job of rsync, gzip and mcrypt piped over ssh to your friend’s server over his DSL line.“
LOL!

Andy,

I’ll ask our European office to follow up with you. We do a have a very successful affiliate model, with thousands of affiliates.

Your data is always encrypted on our servers.

We don’t disclose the specific location of our datacenters, but we have multiple in North America and have just opened our first in Europe.

- Charles at Decho

I echo the comments below, quoted from a blog above

“I, like many, use Mozy for peace of mind, and if I don’t have that with Mozy I need to find another service where I do.“

I purchased Mozy in December with high hopes it would be an effective product. After installing it initially and spending several days downloading my data to your server, I received several error mesages. Your site said to uninstall/resinstall in response to these error messages. I unistalled. Now I unable to reinstall. Talk with your online LiveChat people (Andreas Horlacher) proved totally unhelpful - they claimed never to have experienced the problem and said they “would get back to me by e-mail”. They never have. Efforts to reach your support center got me the following response:“your message cannot be delivered”. What kind of support is that? So, now I’m up the proverbial creek. I have had no response of any kind from Mozy now for over a week despite multiple requests for help with resolution of my problem. I am now about to request a full refund from you, Mr. CEO. I look forward to a quick, satisfactory response, but will have great, great difficulty recommending your product or service to anyone.

VERY DISSATISFIED IN SAN DIEGO

Look, I talk as a third party, not involved in any way with decho, emc or the mozy service, and I think that if you weren’t able to receive support, probably is because inside this company something happened (I suppose things like lay-offs and management switches).
This does seem obvious from the fact that emc fused two former companies into one, calling it decho.
Now I don’t know what’s happening on the inside, but we have one new company with the burden and internal conflitcs of two, so we have to cope with it.

The mozy service doesn’t sound so complicated, in fact it probably isn’t, also its price seems honest enough;
I suppose you’d soon receive due support or refund.

Just my 2 cents.

Further to my 1/13 e-mail, which I copied to Decho’s PR personnel. I received - finally - multiple, quick, effective amd satisfactory responses on 1/14. This involved a lot of live conversation, e-mailing, and computer interaction to resolve what was not an easy problem. In fairness to Mozy I must now change my opinion as stated yesterday to a much more favorable one. Mozy can and does have the ability provide the kind of attentive, proficient technical support that ensures peace of mind in their customers. My thanks in particular to technical support personnel Norris Packer and Ryan Crompton.

NOW SATISFIED IN SAN DIEGO

This is a follow-up to my original post on 12/24/2008.  After my post, I was promptly contacted by Decho/Mozy.  My problem was ultimately resolved, and like Michael Grisdale’s post above, this involved live conversation, e-mailing, and trying various things on my computer to resolve what was not a simple problem.  Many thanks to James and Kevin at Decho for getting this resolved.

My Mozy backup has been working great, and I am once again a very satisfied customer.  I hope in the future issues can be resolved by contacting support directly, rather than having to post to the CEO’s blog!

NOW SATISFIED IN ATLANTA!

I have been using Mozy Pro for a month now and it has failed to backup most nights.  The log shows repeated attempts but failure to connect to the Mozy server. Firewall etc correctly configured and on the nights it does connect, it backs up quite merrily. Support have stopped replying to my messages, and my client is livid.  Wondered if I posted my findings on every site I find, I might get some help??

Hello Harel,

To introduce myself: I am a Senior Vice President at CSS Corp (http://www.csscorp.com), and head the Enterprise Support Services practice. The primary reason I wanted to connect with you is to share with you certain ideas that we have been pursuing internally, very similar to what PI Corporation was planning to implement. Currently we are calling the project “MyCloudBuddy” (http://www.mycloudbuddy.com), and have started uploading interim versions on Code.Google.com. We have already built MS Office / Outlook based plug-ins and will be releasing browser and mobile (Apple, MS) plug-ins over the next 2 months. We are looking at partnerships for implementing these retail models. I look forward to connecting with you.

Regards,
Sandip Deb
(C) 408 5941698

Mozy & Decho Team:

I’ve spent my entire career in IT - focusing on data management & data protection.  Mozy seemed like an exciting, useful, safe way to achieve what is difficult for many small time users - offsite data storage.  The disappointment that followed my signup and exchanges with Mozy has been severe.  I put months of effort into achieving backup success with Mozy.

Mozy absolutely misses the point of backup.  How in the world could there be a backup service that deletes backups as soon as it sees that the original files are missing??  What is the point of backup when it deletes synchronously with originals?  This is dangerous and reckless.  Momentary disconnect of my 1TB and 2TB volumes resulted in near-immediate and irrevocable loss of all of my backups!  This set be back MONTHS at a time.  The turtle slow pace of Mozy also renders it useless for anyone backing up more than a handful of files.

Multiple exchanges with sales & support have either rendered me with non-answers or non-replies. 

Please issue me a refund.  To do anything else would be thievery and deceit.

If you would like to review my experience in detail in an effort to provide a useful, helpful service, please feel free to contact me.

Regards,
Will

OK, I’m out.  After coming across an incredibly simple error in the Mac client (I cant change the time at which a backup takes place without the client hanging), I decided to give you the benefit of the doubt and contact tech support.

the email I got back was a joke.  the tech clearly had not read the email, and asked me to reinstall the “latest version” because I was “having trouble completing a backup”.  (I was not “having trouble”.  the software was hanging during a simple edit of a text box). 

since I had only installed two days before, that’s kinda silly.  also the tech didnt bother to tell me what version number the “latest version” might be etc etc.

you think I’m going to trust you with my data after an experience like that?  a:  no.

good luck.

(my intent had not been to post this in a public forum but my attempts to email you directly failed).

Hello Mr. Kodesh,

I am writing to let you know why I have stopped being a paid Mozy customer.

I have been a fan of Mozy and I have told many people about it.  Unfortunately the Mac client has bugs that caused me to give up.

The synopsis is that a memory leak makes the Mac client unusable for large numbers of files and the support team refuses to admin it.  They prefer to blame my RAM which has been tested to be fine.  I invested quite a bit of time on this even so far as to have found the problem (exceeding the 4 GB limit of a 32 bit application) but I can’t spend any more.

The details can be found in these tickets: t69133145257500, t18168171683019, ZWD-410060

I remain open to becoming a customer in the future if the software and support issues even become resolved.

Sincerely,
Mont Rothstein