Tugboat Pulls Data From Dead PCs

Company: Tugboat Enterprises

Headquarters: Redwood City, Calif.

Technology Sector: Storage

Key Product: Selkie Software

Year Founded: 2004

Number of Channel Partners: 223 worldwide

Ideal Channel Partner: Enterprise-focused solution providers

Why You Should Care: A crashed computer means data is trapped inside -- and that information is often mission-critical to a customer's business. Here's how a small investment can increase your data recovery business, or help you get into that market segment.

The Lowdown: "I meant to back up, but I was on the road for so long ..." How many times have you heard that song after a customer's computer crashed with valuable data trapped inside? A company's most precious commodity is its information, but if the computer's dead, that information rapidly becomes useless -- and can put the business in dire straits.

Tugboat Enterprises' Selkie Software is designed to retrieve data from those dead PCs and Macs. And it does so at a reasonable cost of around $100.

"The No. 1 question we get is, 'Does your software really work?" said Judi Tyabji Wilson, CEO of Tugboat. "Our company can solve a problem that is experienced by most computer users faster and for less money than the competition can."

Tugboat Selkie Rescue

The product can be used two ways. On an existing network, a customer puts the Selkie CD in the dead computer, the software runs, creates a file share and the lost information is retrieved and becomes available to a designated working computer. The dead machine is cleaned up, and when it's back online the files can be restored to it. Selkie Rescue moves the files in the same order to another working computer, so the information is easy for the user to find.

Selkie Freedom is a similar product that is built on a USB key. It moves files in order of perceived importance; for example, it would move spreadsheets and Microsoft Word documents before temporary files. Freedom is the more appropriate solution for computers not attached to a network, the company says.

In times when companies are hunting for ways to do more with less, products that can help lower costs both for solution providers and end users can go a long way. Solution providers can offer data recovery services at a fraction of the cost a service such as Geek Squad might charge, said Tyabji Wilson.

"[Solution providers] can save money using a product like this that can do the job in one hour instead of five hours," she said. "They can have 20 computers lined up, wipe them -- and then reinstall everything."