Avamar

Background:
Avamar Technologies, Inc., is an Irvine, CA company that has provided patented disk-basedback-up, restore and disaster recovery solutions since 1999. Axion, Avamar’s main solution,efficiently stores and protects a company’s data while providing online accessibility.Avamar’s software was highly touted by industry experts but the company had to overcome ahuge perceptual juggernaut: Avamar’s solution was disk-based and broke from the status quo oftape-based backup systems offered by industry behemoths such Veritas and IBM. It was astreet fight that pitted a talented yet wiry youngster against a band of chiseled 250-lb prize fighters who knock out start-ups with impunity.

The key to Avamar’s survival was to create a discussion in the trade media about disk vs. tape which had previously not existed. The company had to first shatter the status quo in order to gain the base credibility needed to open doors so its sales force could be given the opportunityto pitch the merits of Axion. A major obstacle was that the majority of the trade press was still biased toward tape-based storage. The media, rightly so, is filled with skeptics and it was up to INK to prove to them the merits of Avamar’s software solutions.

Another major obstacle was that Avamar had few high-profile customers and the few that they did have declined to speak on record for various reasons. INK had to somehow convince the media of the “worth” of Axion without the help of big-name third-party endorsements.

Strategy/Tactics:
INK developed a strategy that overcame these obstacles and resulted in more than 36 media placements in 2005 ranging from trade media to national business press (it should be noted that due to INK’s business model, we do not count the additional hits Avamar has received over the past year that resulted from pick-ups of press announcements. We only count the media placements with which we were instrumental in bringing to fruition).

Coinciding with INK’s success, over the last year Avamar achieved the following
accomplishments:

- Increased revenue by 300 percent
- Increased the customer base by more than 300 percent, including five customers in the Fortune 200
- Increased the solution provider partner coverage by 500 percent
- Had two "major vendors" launch services based on Avamar technology (IBM "Point in Time Backup and Replication" and STK "ViaRemote")
- Expanded coverage into Europe and already have three production customers
-Won four awards for innovation and customer success

Results:
More specifically, here are some the key success INK achieved for Avamar in 2005:

Key Success #1: Trade Media
A recent PRWeek/Burson-Marsteller survey published in November 2005 found that companies view trade magazines as the most influential type of media exposure behind only DowJones/WSJ. INK and Avamar share this sentiment, knowing that the success of Axion would be won or lost on the pages of the trade media. As a result, INK crafted a strategy that aggressivelytargeted the storage and technology trades. The agency had very little prior experience in the data storage space but immersed itself in the industry and its related media to learn its formats,jargon, key players, news cycles, and most importantly, to develop an industry-specific lens for determining what topics are intrinsically newsworthy and which topics are not worth bothering the media with.

The tactic proved a great success and produced the following placements:
• BIO IT World .com (2x)
• Byte & Switch.com (6x)
• ChannelINsider.com
• CIO Insight.com
• CRN (2x)
• Computer Technology
Review (3x)
• Enterprise Systems(4x)
• eWeek (3x)
• Information Week
• INFOSTOR (2x)
• IT World
• Network World
• Network World Fusion(2x)
searchstorage.com (12x)
• Storage Magazine (5x)
• Storage Pipeline.com (4x)
•Windows IT Pro.

Key Success #2: Turning “boring” technology into a national business story
One of the most difficult tasks INK faced was to try and get Avamar coverage in the national business media. The company is small by Fortune 500 standards, is private, does not have any big names clients (willing to talk) or executives, and it sells a product that is as boring and dry as Melba toast to 99.9% of business reporters.

INK knew that Avamar’s product in and of itself did not have enough intrinsic newsworthiness to the business media. So instead of naively thinking that we could convince the media that Avamar was newsworthy by dressing it up in gilded euphemisms as some agencies try to do, we focused on trying to tie Avamar and Axion to real news events them. INK constantly monitored the press for breaking national news stories that in some way could be related to storage software and Avamar.
The strategy worked and led to placements in BusinessWeek.com, CNBC Europe, NPR, The Deal, and The Wall Street Journal. Most recently this tactic proved successful during hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

INK secured several major media placements about data disaster recovery using a pitch about Avamar’s “Data Evacuation” solution and positioned Avamar’s executives as experts on the newest techniques in data disaster back-up and recovery. INK achieved these results despite not being able to interview a major distribution partner as originally promised and despite the fact that two Avamar customers that used Axion to save and retrieve data during Hurricane Rita were unable to comment in a timely manner due to their own physical evacuation from Texas.

Key Success #3: Transforming Negative Publicity into Positive Publicity
Negative publicity is reality. Companies need to know that it is eventually going to happen for one reason or another. What is crucial is how a company deals with it when it happens. We advocate to our clients to deal with it head on to see it as an opportunity to transform a negative into positive. One such situation occurred in 2005 when Byte and Switch published a negative review of Avamar. It was reviewed as being in the “Bit Bucket” in the media outlet’s Top 10 Companies of 2005, after having been one of the top ten companies in the 2004 review.

INK assessed the particular reasons the client received the negative review and worked with Avamar to create a point-by-point rebuttal that revealed misunderstandings of the company’s technology and what Avamar viewed as an incomplete assessment of one area of the market. Through diligent and targeted outreach, INK secured two subsequent stand-alone stories with Byte and Switch, including a feature on Avamar CEO Ed Walsh.

Key Success #4: The Perfect Placement
A number of the hits INK placed included very prestigious media outlets such The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, and NPR—however, none of these are the hit we are the most proud of. The placement that best represents the success of our campaign is the one garnered in a media outlet that is little known outside of the storage industry. The hit, titled “Hospital Ditches Veritas, tape”, was in Searchstorage.com, a key storage trade outlet. Here is why we take such pride in this particular placement: This placement was born from a slow news period forcing INK to develop alternate methods of getting press.

INK studied Searchstorage.com for months and decided to develop possible
feature story around the case study for Avamar customer St. Peter’s Hospital. The pitch was custom-tailored for the reporter we felt would be most receptive based on previous stories she had penned. The Axion solution had yielded very positive results for the customer and preinterviewing determined that the contact at St. Peter’s was very eloquent and eager to speak with the press. INK secured a series of interviews with Searchstorage.com that resulted in a wonderful, balanced 1000-word placement.

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