Faronics saw 2005 sales of $16 million, expects 30 per cent more this year
Gillian Shaw
Sun
Vik Khanna’s Faronics Corp. enjoys growing sales, thanks to its Deep Freeze software. Photograph by : Ian Lindsay, Vancouver Sun
Deep Freeze has turned into a hot commodity for a Vancouver software company that is safeguarding corporate computers from outside attacks as well as internal mishaps.
Faronics Corp. is riding a crest of growth that saw $16 million in sales last year, forecast to rise another 30 per cent this year and a hiring rate that is adding 20 employees a year to its new digs in downtown Vancouver.
Its flagship product Deep Freeze is protecting more than five million workstations worldwide. It is backed by Anti-Executable and a lineup of current and upcoming products that are being welcomed by public sector and corporate users looking for an affordable and effective way to keep their computer workstations running reliably.
Faronics clients include: the Vancouver Public Library; the University of B.C.; a lineup of banks and credit unions across the U.S.; and Best Buy stores.
Fifty-nine of B.C.’s 61 school districts use Faronics software and the Vancouver school board found an unexpected side benefit to it. Along with keeping machines free of the downloads student users might be tempted to add, Deep Freeze also has a shutdown feature that saved the board $200,000 a year in electricity bills by automatically turning off idle computers.
“It’s a resiliency story,” said sales manager Dennis Boulter. “Especially for corporations, downtime is measured in tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour.
“IT [information technology] is so critical now you can’t run a business without it.”
Just like the folks who get an alarm installed after they’re broken into, many Faronics customers call when they have suffered a disruptive and costly collapse of their systems.
“We have casinos coming out of the woodwork,” said Boulter. One company that had all its machines go down found Faronics “and loaded up on every product we sold,” said Boulter.
Deep Freeze runs on PCs and also has a Mac version that recently earned a 41/2 mice out of five rating from Macworld magazine. It lets companies and organizations freeze their computer workstation configurations, so users can’t inadvertently or malevolently modify them.
In combination with Anti-Executable, software that prevents the installation or launch of any unlicensed or unwanted programs, the Faronics lineup presents a formidable defense against both external and internal attacks. And unlike anti-virus software, it doesn’t have to be updated to remain effective.
That is a lifesaver for harried IT departments. They can be overrun with problems that range from staff downloading poker software to remote workers who bring back virus-laden notebooks to plug into the company’s system to outsiders looking to load a hidden program that could bring down the business.
It’s a far cry from the computer selling business that Frid Ali and Vik Khanna started in Coquitlam back in 1996. Looking to increase sales, they targeted school districts. A couple of blocks away in their neighborhood, Hyper Technologies was a hardware customer and it suggested to Khanna that he might try out the software they were developing, an early version of Deep Freeze.
“Within an hour, I said, ‘forget me helping you out, give me the rights to sell it,’ ” said Khanna. “I was just floored by the technology.”
Within six months, the company had sold $350,000 worth of the software and by June 2000, it acquired the non-exclusive rights to sell in the U.S.
“Sales just went up and up,” said Khanna.
By 2003, Faronics bought Hyper Technologies with Khanna and Ali joining Hyper Technologies partners Randy Lomnes and Denis Kirk with the four each holding a 25 per cent ownership stake.
Even before the takeover, Khanna said Faronics stopped selling computers “cold turkey,” but kept every one of its then 16 employees who turned their attention from hardware to software.
Many of the original employees can be found among the 88 staff at Faronics now. Some, like Igor Zagoruchenko and Rehan Rizvi who used to build computers, made the transformation from hardware to software specialists and became software developers in the newly reconstituted company.
Word of mouth is accounting for much of the popularity of Faronics software. It’s extolled on mailing lists and discussion groups on the Web. Help desks find they are becoming like the Maytag repairman, spared the long hours of cleaning up behind users who would mess up machines faster than they could keep up with them.
Corporate users are finding it so effective at the office that they are downloading the consumer version, available only on the website at www.faronics.com to safeguard home computers.
The price of $220 US for the server product and $30 a seat with volume discounts and “extremely education friendly” pricing also puts Deep Freeze within reach of many customers.
“They go into shock when they find it’s not $20,000 a server and $250 a seat,” said Boulter.
© The Vancouver Sun 2006