As stated in their blog post, Barracuda have announced that both Copy and CudaDrive services will be discontinued on May 7th brought on by a shift in their business focus. While proper reasoning hasn’t come to fruition as of yet – I will go through a couple of possible scenarios as to why this sudden change of plan may be the case, and why it’s a good idea.
Image courtesy of LifeHacker
Little Fish in a Big Pond
The filesharing market is a massive place filled with services such as Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive and Box to name a few. Copy hasn’t been around long since their launch in 2013, but their impact and sudden popularity since joining the foray of filesharing megastars is not to be forgotten.
If you don’t know about Copy, Barracuda launched the service in early 2013 and it hit off in a big way. The company offered incentives to join their website using a ‘referral’ scheme which included an extra 5GB of data allocated onto a persons account if their friend or anybody signed up via the referral link they provided to them. This wasn’t only a success – it took social media by storm, and unknowingly got Copy’s name out there by word of mouth. It’s an incentive that all of the other filesharing services have had in place since their incarnations, but were never as big as what Copy were offering. I’ll give you some numbers:
- Dropbox offer an extra 500MB allocated to your total storage for referring 1 friend (Maximum 16GB)
- OneDrive offer the same referral scheme as Dropbox but with a maximum of up to 5GB
- Google Drive do not offer a referral scheme
- Box hold ‘promotional’ sign-up incentives. And if you’re lucky, get a minimum of 50GB allocated upon sign-up
To put this into perspective: Copy had no caps on referrals, and you could get as much extra storage as you want on your account as long as you had people signing up via your referral. I myself have over 200GB on my account. But other than the referral and capless bonus system, this is where the sharing service fell down.
It didn’t bring anything new or exciting to the table. The web UI worked as most sharing services do. You have a simple GUI (Graphical User Interface) with a place to upload all your files, categorise them and that’s about it. This service was never here to bring you away from the big players, and that’s a recipe for disaster no matter how good your referrals are. Don’t get me wrong, referral bonuses are great. But you want something better on the other side of that sign-up window to keep you there, and Barracuda didn’t capitalise on their social media boost to keep people interested.
Shifting Business Focus
I want to bring up the point that is being mentioned quite a lot in their blog post, and that’s the shift in their business focus. CudaDrive, which is the other service being discontinued, is a fantastic business-oriented service that provides seamless filesharing within a business in a secure way. Much like what Copy does, but in a more confidential manner.
I believe the main focal point of this blog post is that they’re going to be offering their services elsewhere in the world of business, and selling their product in a larger manner for corporations to use. I may be reading too much into this, but this shift in focus could be a clean slate for Barracuda, which is something a lot of companies would do if they had the opportunity to do so. Going down this route would have a great payoff for Barracuda, as their current baseline model of offering business solutions worked in small doses. It’s just all about changing that algorithm to suit the bigger corporate engine and moving forward with it. CudaDrive was a brilliant service that not many people caught on to for the same reasoning Copy didn’t catch on. It had no staying power after the initial signing up of the service.
I’m glad that Barracuda are shifting their focus to something else that they can shine at, because they’ve proven that they are capable in some capacity to bring customers in with incentives.
What Now?
If you’re an existing Copy customer with files stored on their servers, you’re in luck. Barracuda have partnered with Mover for an easy way to migrate your files to other sharing services. A step-by-step guide has been provided by Barracuda to make this as easy as possible in order to get migrated sooner rather than later, before cut-off date of May 7th. Links below:
If you’re a paid customer of either the CudaDrive or Copy services, Barracuda have stated in their blog post to await an e-mail on what’s happening with that. They also urge everybody with any questions about this, to visit their FAQ page.
