We’ve been posting quite a few product announcements on the blog recently. First Jungle Disk Desktop 2.0, then the Workgroup Edition, and now we’ve got one more before we lock the doors and put the finishing touches on Jungle Disk 2.0.  We get requests on a regular basis from businesses that want to offer managed online backup services to their customers using the Jungle Disk software and Amazon S3 service. We’re pleased to announce that we’ll soon be offering a Reseller Edition of Jungle Disk to help meet this need.

The Reseller Edition is based on the Workgroup Edition and has many of the same features including sub-accounts, access controls, and usage reporting. The main difference is that the client software will not be Jungle Disk or Amazon-branded. Our reseller partners will be free to sell the service to their customers under their own brand or bundled with other IT services. The Reseller Edition will be available as part of two programs. The White Label program will include a generic-branded client with no Jungle Disk or partner-specific branding in the software. This program will be completely turn-key and have a low startup cost. The second option is the Private Label program, which includes a custom build of the software with your branding and logos. The Private Label program is targeted at larger resellers who want full integration of their own brand in the software.

Using the Reseller Edition is simple and secure. The reseller partner provides a single Amazon S3 account that will be used to store all their customer’s data. The Jungle Disk technology provides a secure way to isolate customer’s data from each other and doesn’t require the S3 account credentials on customer machines. Our account management site allows the reseller to create and manage customer accounts and obtain daily reports on usage by customer or groups of customers.

Pricing for the Reseller Edition is simple - the reseller partner pays the base Amazon S3  usage fees ($0.15/gb) and a Jungle Disk license fee of $2/user/month, and they are then free to bill their customers however they choose - based on usage, flat rate, or integrated as part of a complete managed services package. We don’t mark up the Amazon pricing and we don’t restrict how partners bill their customers. Compared to other online backup reseller offerings that are $1.50/gb or more, we think companies will see a significant savings with Amazon S3 and Jungle Disk.

We’re starting an interest list from companies that are considering reselling Jungle Disk. If you want to be notified when more information is available and when we start beta testing for the program, please sign up here.

Amid all the activity here getting ready for the Jungle Disk 2.0 launch we’re still working hard on finding great people to join the team. Scott introduced himself a few weeks ago, and today I have the pleasure of introducing Adam Preble, our first full-time Mac developer. While all of our developers have some Mac experience, Adam is our first true Cocoa-coding, iPhone-carrying, Steve Jobs-lovin’ Mac guy. He’ll be working on functionality across all the platforms we support, but I expect you’ll see more attention paid to the Mac user experience now that Adam is on the team. Please join me in welcoming Adam, and if you think you might be interested in joining the team, please check out our remaining job openings.

In my last post, I outlined many of the great new things that you will see in Jungle Disk 2.0.  The product is making a huge leap forward in many areas and the Jungle Disk team is working very hard to get things wrapped up to begin the beta process.  Now that I have seen 2.0 in action, I am probably more excited than all of you to get my hands on it!

Over the past several months, many of our customers communicated a clear need to leverage the powerful online backup and storage functionality of Jungle Disk across groups of users. As the needs of our customers grow, so does our desire to meet those needs through improvements and additions to the Jungle Disk product line.

Thus, it is with great pleasure that we officially announce the future release of the Jungle Disk Workgroup Edition.  This new addition to the product line shares all of the power and usability of Jungle Disk 2.0, while providing several additional features to make the administration of groups of users possible.  Here are just a few of the enhancements that you will see in the Jungle Disk Workgroup Edition:

• The ability to create ’sub-accounts’ to support multiple users with a single S3 account
• Customizable secure access control to multiple buckets, along with private and shared buckets
• User management, bucket management and usage reporting via a web-based admin console

Our plan is to offer the workgroup edition for $2 per user per month.  This fee would include the software, support, upgrades, and Jungle Disk Plus. I would like to emphasize that this is a per user license and not a per computer license.  Each licensed user can install the software on multiple computers (work, home, laptop, etc.) at no additional cost.  Pricing for the Amazon S3 service remains just $0.15 per GB.

To ensure that there is a clear distinction between products as we go forward, the existing Jungle Disk application will be referred to as the Jungle Disk Desktop Edition.

Without question, the Jungle Disk Workgroup Edition is a great step towards giving our business customers more control over their online backup and storage.  More information about signing up for the private beta and the planned release dates will be shared in the near future.

A few weeks ago I posted about Microsoft getting into the cloud computing space with their SQL Data Services service, and predicted that Google would soon join the game as well. As you may have already heard, yesterday Google announced their entry into the market for developer-oriented cloud services - Google App Engine. Neither Microsoft nor Google can currently match what Amazon currently offers, either in breadth or when it comes to bulk data storage with Amazon S3. Google currently limits applications to 500MB of storage and doesn’t provide APIs suitable for uploading or downloading large files, however in their Campfire presentation they had a slide with large file services at the top of their “What’s Next?” list so it’s only a matter of time (and price!).

While we’re still completely focused on building the best possible service on the Amazon S3 platform, it’s good to know that there will be more options “in the cloud” down the road. I think these announcements further validate Jungle Disk’s strategy of focusing on building great storage software rather than building datacenters and server farms.

Let me go ahead start things off by introducing myself. My name is Scott Gibson and I joined the Jungle Disk team a few weeks ago, taking on the role of VP of Operations. There certainly isn’t a shortage of things to do around here and I am incredibly excited to be working with Dave Wright and a great product like Jungle Disk.

As many of you know, the current version of Jungle Disk has done a superb job of meeting your online backup and storage needs, however, we have put forth a lot of effort to make the next version even more powerful and more intuitive. It is important to note that many of these new enhancements are a direct result of the valuable feedback that we have received from our customers, so on behalf of all of us here at Jungle Disk…thank you!

Along with the new product update, you can also expect a fresh new look for the JungleDisk.com website.

Ok, so enough beating around the bush…let’s get to what you really want to know in this post…What’s going on with Jungle Disk 2.0?

Here are just a few of the great things you can expect in Jungle Disk 2.0:

Jungle Disk 2.0 will:

• Include a new setup wizard for easy first-time setup
• Implement a completely new automatic backup file/directory selection interface
• Give you the option to connect to multiple buckets at the same time, even under different Amazon accounts
• Support the ability to create multiple backup jobs, each with their own schedule and backup options
• Extend the ‘bandwidth limiting’ features - limits apply to all network traffic, can be set on a schedule, and can be changed on the fly
• Allow for greater control over your ‘previous versions’ options - min and max numbers of previous versions, exclude selected file types and folders
• Provide new Jungle Disk bucket features - instant file and directory renames, encryption key changing, encrypted filenames
• Offer a new ‘backup preview’ dialog
• Enable support for buckets compatible with other S3 software and support for creating European S3 buckets
• Deliver significant performance improvements with large numbers of files
• ….and much more!

Super-Top Secret Screen Shots of Jungle Disk 2.0

• Setup Wizard Screen Shots
• Application Configuration Screen Shots