May 29, 2007

BackupKey Rolls Out to 'Big Box' Stores At Trade Show

Shelia Watson  /  Charleston Regional Business Journal

The roll-out of Turnkey Technology Solutions' new product happened in the best possible venue: before the nation's top retailers who were looking for new products for the coming year.

When Tom Fair, president and CEO of James Island-based Turnkey, presented his computer backup system, BackupKey, at the RetailVision Spring 2007 trade show in Nashville, Tenn., the product was voted one of the top five new technologies at the show.

"It takes some nerve to stand up in front of Amazon, Best Buy, Staples and Office Depot and tell them that we are the world's easiest (backup system)," Fair said. "But you know what? Once we had shown them the product in action, not one of them disputed that claim."

Fair's claim of being the easiest is based not only on the size of the unit - a box that would fit in a shirt pocket and no need for a power supply - but also on its one-click operation. "It's very easy to use," Fair said. "You plug it in and get a pop-up screen asking if you want to back up your computer. Click yes and that's it."

The system is also fast: 3 seconds to back up his travel computer, although he said there was not as much data on that system as what resides on his office computer. "If you had, say, the entire collection of Stephen Colbert videos from YouTube on your computer, sure, it would probably take a little more time," he said. "But we actually don't make any claim that it's faster. What we claim it does better is get things (to back up)that other systems would'nt get."

For instance, he said, 90% of computer users do not know where to locate the email data files for Outlook. BackupKey is set up to save those files automatically. The idea for the product came out of his computer consulting work, which was the original business model for Turnkey when it was founded by Fair in 1995.

"I worked with a lot of people - real estate companies, lawyers, doctors and other individuals - and it became a regular event to protect or save data on their computers," he said. "So I designed a technique that, if followed properly, would guarantee the safety of all the data on a computer. When I refined the technique to the point where I could do it again and again without changing anything, I realized I could reproduce it with software."

Fair had to relearn how to do programming, and in spring 2006, he began developing the BackupKey product, he said. The system is programmed in Visual Basic and requires no installation or configuration. It can be used on individual computers or on multiple computers in small businesses and is compatible with Windows 2000, XP and Vista. Fair hopes to release a Mac version in 2008.

Turnkey employs five people at its James Island location along with several subcontractors across the country. "All the brains behind the product are here in Charleston," he said. "All customer support is based here and will continue to be. The only things outsourced were the things not available in Charleston."

Among those things was the retail packaging supply chain. "We're moving from direct sales to in-store sales, and it's taken a while to assemble a team," he said. "We had to assemble teams to do design, packaging, warehousing, distribution and sales so we can get it into the stores. That kind of functionality and market knowledge just does not exist in Charleston."

Fair went to the West Coast to find contractors to provide those services, he said. This summer he expects to release a network version of the product that will attached directly to a network, not to individual computers. Notwithstanding the vote of confidence he saw at the trade show, there are still challenges. "The biggest challenge was and still is people's inability to see the difference between dumb storage and intelligent solution," he said. "For example, I can say this is $200 and they'll say they can just get a flash drive for $100. But what they don't realize is we make it easier and we back up what (the flash drives) wouldn't back up."

So far the company has five products ranging from $90 for a 4-gigabyte storage unit to $549 for a 1-terabyte unit. "The average business computer has less than 1 gigabyte of data on it, which means the 1-terabyte unit can back up 1,000 computers, every one of them without installation, configuration or hardware setup," he said.

Fair said he has been in negotiations with several of the "big box" stores such as Office Depot and Staples and expects the product to be on the shelves this summer. He plans to develop other products as well as market the BackupKey with private labeling for the stores. He has filed two patent applications.