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Michael Lewin, founder and CEO of disaster recovery company Kashya, seems to take a slightly different approach to most hi- tech entrepreneurs. Rather than rush his product out because the market needed some kind of solution in the wake of the 9/11 tragedy, he decided to complete the work slowly and steadily in an effort to produce the best possible technology on the market.
It was a gamble. While Kashya was still perfecting its product, other companies - some of them sizable - were already attempting to take control of an increasingly crowded marketplace. The risk may have paid off, however. Few of the current solutions now on the market offer the features that organizations desperately require to transfer their data to remote locations and keep it safe. That still leaves Kashya with a potential market. All the company has to do now is to prove that its disaster recovery technology, the Kashya Data Protection Appliance, really is what the industry is looking for.
Micah Avni, general partner of Jerusalem Global Ventures, is one who thinks it can.
"Kashya is one of the most exciting technology companies in Israel right now," he says.
Kashya originally started life as Kashya Software Solutions, a software company that employed a number of experienced engineers to work on a variety of problem- solving projects for other companies. Using this experience, Lewin and his team built up a clear picture of the problem-points in today's hi-tech industry.
In December 2000, after a number of surveys with high- level technology personnel in Israel and abroad, Lewin decided to focus on one particular field - remote replication of data, or as it is more commonly known today - disaster recovery. Lewin's goal was to build a high- performance dedicated disaster recovery solution, with all the features specifically built around this.
By this stage, the hi-tech bubble had already burst, and investors were looking for companies with solid business plans that could offer significant must-have technology.
"Investors did not want companies offering tools that were nice to have, but ones that provided mission critical technology that overcame problems that had clearly not yet been addressed," explains Johnny Stern, Kashya's VP of corporate development, who then worked for investment house, Jerusalem Global.
"We...