Datto, Inc Recognized As Leader In Information Backup Industry

By Nancy K. Crevier

Datto, Inc, of Norwalk, celebrated its fifth year in business, July 4, and 2003 Newtown High School graduate and chief executive officer of the company, Austin McChord, could not be more pleased.

Datto, Inc provides swift backup and disaster recovery solutions to medium-sized businesses worldwide, using its hardware-based innovations, onsite and offsite. According to Mr McChord’s biography provided to The Bee, “[Mr McChord’s] continued work and success at Datto has enabled small IT firms to provide enterprise class BDR offerings for their clients. He routinely speaks to audiences at industry trade events and regularly appears as an advising panel member at trade association meetings.”

“Locally, we provide solutions in office with one of our appliances, or remotely, using our “cloud” services,” said Mr McChord. “We have data centers storing all of the backup information in Pennsylvania and California,” he said.

The Datto, Inc website describes the company as offering “three product families, each available with different size appliances, configurations, and form factors.”

Currently servicing more than 10,000 companies worldwide, and protecting information equivalent to more than a thousand times that in every book in the Library of Congress — more than ten petabytes — Mr McChord gave as an example of Datto’s services the story of a doctors’ office destroyed in the 2011 Joplin, Mo., tornado. “They used Datto, and we were able to restore all of their files and bring up all of the computers, restoring their applications,” he said. By bringing up virtual copies of a company’s servers, Datto can restore information in many cases within six seconds. “That’s very, very fast,” Mr McChord noted.

A graduate of Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) with a degree in bioinformatics, Mr McChord has been interested in what he can make computers do since he was a third grader at Head O’ Meadow School in Newtown. He first dabbled in writing computer games as an elementary school student, checking out books on writing computer code from the HOM library. He remained heavily involved in technology and computers through high school.

After graduation from RIT, he decided a career in computations solving biological problems for big pharmaceutical companies was not what he wanted to do. He did see, however, that there was a universal need for information backup.

“I saw what there was, and thought I could do better,” said Mr McChord. “I thought there was not a lot of innovation in what was out there. And of all the ideas I had, [backup and disaster recovery of information] seemed the most practical and possible to make happen,” he said.

He credits family and friends with helping him to turn his ideas into a marketable product. Datto, Inc started out a one-man operation in office space provided to him by his father’s civil engineering firm in Wilton. “I was working for Inflatable Packaging in Newtown, four days a week, and three days of the week I was working on Datto. It took a good seven months to get the first product ready,” said Mr McChord. Then, he pestered technology bloggers to review the product. “We got reasonably positive reviews, that attracted attention, and people started noticing us,” he said.

Several Datto employees are people that Mr McChord attended school with, in Newtown. “The only way to get started was to hire my friends,” said Mr McChord, “the only ones who dared work with me.” Approximately 15 former Newtowners now work at Datto, Inc, he said, including Shannon Kohn, media relations, and Josh Tamarkin, director of customer support.

In just five years, Datto, Inc has become so “noticed” that the company has shown a 300 percent, year after year growth, for the past three years. Datto, Inc employs more than 100 people now, and expects that number to reach over 150 by the end of the year, said Mr McChord. In 2011, the company moved into a larger space in Norwalk.

He also credits the skepticism of a college professor in propelling him to success. “He told me this business would never work, and that was a great motivation to me to make it work,” he laughed.

Datto, Inc has also become “noticed” enough to be recognized as a leading provider of backup and disaster recovery solutions, industry wide. The company has received five awards in 2012, most recently the “Best Cloud Solution” from ASCII Group at the ASCII IT Success Summit in Washington, D.C., July 3. Datto, Inc received “Best Cloud Solution” at the ASCII IT Boston Success Summit in April 2012 and at the ASCII IT Los Angeles Success Summit in March. In June, Ms Kohn was named to the Computer Reseller News 2012 List of “100 People You Don’t Know, But Should,” and Datto, Inc is the recipient of the 2012 Business Solutions “Best Channel Vendor” award.

“We continue to do well in our market,” said Mr McChord, and Datto, Inc looks forward to further expanding internationally. He is curious to see in which position Datto, Inc ends up on the Inc Magazine list of 500 fastest growing businesses in the country, to be published in the September 2012 issue. Being in the top 30 would not surprise him, he said.

“Continuing to grow is our big thing, right now.”

Datto, Inc sells its SIRIS, SIRISlite, and G Series only to resellers. To locate Managed Service Providers and for more information about Datto, Inc, visit dattobackup.com.