FalconStor announced its expansion in the Software as a Service (SaaS) market, collaborating with HiNet - the Internet service provider (ISP) arm of Chunghwa Telecom, an information and telecom service provider in Taiwan - to make online backup services available to customers and small-and-medium-size businesses in Taiwan.

FalconStor develops open systems software for storage consolidation, virtualization, and data protection. Through its acquisition of Hong Kong-based World Venture, a privately-held online backup and storage services developer for the Telco and enterprise markets, FalconStor enables end-to-end online backup services for ISPs. World Venture provides the front-end Web interface that allows customers to use FalconStor's data protection services via the Internet.

"Software as a Service is a proven model for businesses and consumers to subscribe to WAN-optimized storage services over the broadband network," said ReiJane Huai, chairman and CEO of FalconStor Software. "FalconStor Software's totally open data protection has been deployed by enterprise customers around the world to replicate critical data to and from remote offices, data centers and disaster recovery sites. Our partnership with HiNet will enable us to leverage each other's core competencies to launch cost-effective SaaS-based services."

FalconStor and HiNet are offering HiNet SafeBox services, an online backup and storage service available to HiNet subscribers. "The SafeBox service creates a new business for HiNet-IDC, the integration data center service of HiNet, by extending the market to individual users and the small-and-mid-size business market," said Shyang-Yih Chen, president of HiNet. HiNet has more than 4.3 million broadband users, and the HiNet SafeBox service has acquired over 10,000 end users since its initial launch in Q2 2008. A new release with even more service management features targeted for business customers is scheduled for Q4 2008.

For Storage as a Service, end users simply download a small application onto their computer to back up or archive their data into HiNet-IDC, powered by FalconStor Continuous Data Protector (CDP) and Network Storage Server (NSS). With a simple set-up, the user's data is encrypted and stored at a secure storage server on the Internet at pre-scheduled times. The end user can recover a single file or a complete folder from any computer through the web interface. Storage as a Service also includes features such as versioning, incremental backup and archiving.