What would push a customer to rip out a product and replace it with a competitor's? Downtime, poor performance, lousy technical support, or data-corrupting products could all put a storage area network vendor at risk. So can failing to see the value in simplicity.

Just ask Nexl Inc., an infrastructure hosting vendor in Peabody, Mass., which is focused on the ISP market. It's replacing Legato Systems Inc.'s Networker backup and recovery product with Bakbone Software Inc.'s NetVault backup and recovery product. Bakbone was founded in March and expects to generate between $10 million and $15 million in revenue during its first year.

Nexl uses Compaq Windows NT/2000 servers and tape libraries and Sun Solaris servers and tape libraries, both internally and at its data centers, where it supports its customers. It's testing NetVault in the data centers this week. So why is Nexl tearing out infrastructure software from an established vendor and replacing it with software from a startup? "The interface 'outmillenniums' the competition," says Dennis Oliver, Nexl's director of IS. "We don't have to dig for anything." Oliver also cites preferred heterogeneous device support, ease of installation, and better technical support. President and CEO Cliff Rucker believes he gained a business partner. "Bakbone presented a superior business proposition," Rucker says. "At a technical and executive level, Bakbone streamlines business processes."

Jack Corrao, president and chief operating officer at Bakbone, gives an example of such a technical process. "Our competition have graphical user interfaces, but we provide point-and-click installation," he says. "We install in 15 to 20 minutes, while our competition can take up to a day." Corrao also says that if a customer has a server or storage device that he doesn't support, he'll get the necessary module to them within two days, and they won't have to change a line of code.

Jim Chappell, senior VP of corporate development and marketing at Legato, says the company, which has 40,000 customer accounts, is working hard to maintain its customer-service levels while staying on top of a complex product. "We've certainly as a small company turned on a dime when it was what some customers wanted," Chappell says. "It's not as easy to do today." And it appears Legato can't match Bakbone's claims of being able to support new platforms within two days, Chappell says: "We're on a quarterly release cycle."