The story of Powerbak
Proposed by Fabien PRIOTTO supervised by Pr. Stefano CERRI
Abstract
In 1999, at the end of the speculative dot-com bubble, ManagedStorage, a US company launches PowerBAK, a network solution for backup of PCs running Windows. The company attempts to penetrate the European market and Toulouse is chosen as central site.
Despite of the company's advantages and the qualities of the solution, the PowerBAK project will be abandoned in 2001 and the entire French team will be affected by a redundancy plan. In this paper, we try to trace the elements (economic context, technological choices, technical means, marketing strategy, business decision...) that played a role in this story, the story of PowerBAK.
