My name is Joshua Geist, and those who know me understand that I love technology and the ways in which it can positively change the nature of business, and deliver staggering ROI when properly deployed. That’s really the premise on which our company, Geminare, was founded several years ago.

At the time, I was the CEO of an IT outsourcing firm whose focus was the Small and Medium sized Enterprise or SME market. One of our financial services clients, whose data was very time-sensitive, had a need for a business continuity solution and quickly discovered that the only option for mid-size firms was to buy the various components required to ensure continuous application availability, and build it themselves. The total cost of ownership or TCO was staggering and simply out of reach for a company of their size. So, they approached us and asked the question “Is there a solution somewhere on the market that can deliver what we require?” (or words to that effect).

There wasn’t...but after doing some research with our other more than 200+ clients, I decided there needed to be – and decided to start a new company (Geminare) put a team together to integrate the various components required to deliver such a service, and bring it to market quickly. Ah, the entrepreneurial dream ...

The words “quickly” and the creation of a new solution category just don’t belong in the same sentence. Still, we persisted and in early 2007 Geminare launched its initial business continuity offering a hosted turnkey Server Replication offering. Business was good. Many companies adopted our service, numerous resellers signed on to sell it (including big telco’s like Bell), companies like Deloitte called Geminare a “company to watch” – still there was something missing.

Like many emerging technologies, we were early to market with a solution game changer, hugely disruptive technology and a price point that still were seen by many SMEs as too costly.

Enter the Cloud. As companies raced to turn up cloud infrastructure, Geminare ran along behind them offering to rapidly provide a turnkey, “killer application” - Recovery as a Service - that would help them quickly leverage the value inherent in that infrastructure. Early adopters included leading cloud providers like Hosting.com who raced out of the gate with the first true DR to Cloud, Cloud to Cloud and Migration to Cloud capabilities all based on Geminare’s RaaS offerings.

Prices for RaaS dropped, but more importantly the value of the service sky-rocketed as clients learned first-hand the staggering ROI that continuous application availability delivers. One 300-person law firm, for example, had its Exchange server crash during a scheduled maintenance window – and the server was out for a week! The moment its tech team realized that they had a serious problem, they failed over to Geminare’s RaaS – and ran email for the entire firm for a week off the Cloud RaaS environment.

What makes this so unique is that the firm’s staff including over 150 lawyers and 300 support staff were never even aware that the production system was down. The company literally prevented millions of dollars in lost revenues, and salvaged what could have been a crippling blow to its stellar reputation.

Today, RaaS is gaining momentum as more and more cloud service providers adapt (and pursue adoption of) our technology. We welcome them openly and encourage them to leverage the Cloud Computing infrastructure for all its game changing capabilities.

That first customer...the one who asked if there was a business continuity service that they could afford. Still a client, and proud to say has not seen a single day of downtime for their more than 10 mission critical servers.