The interview was played on every Qantas flights around the world in March 2006.
Peter Switzer: "Graham Henley is the co-founder of GetData Software, a company whose products include the world’s most powerful data recovery products. They have recently won one of the Premiers Export Awards, being named as one of our best Emerging Exporters.
Peter began by asking Graham, as one of the developers of the world's most powerful data recovery software, if he had any comments to make about Microsoft's operating system and software:
GH [laughter] Well, no, I wouldn’t like to criticise Microsoft; they’ve had some pretty good success in recent years, if you’ve noticed.
PS Most definitely, most definitely.
GH But, yeah, the information is still out there on the disk and you can still go and get it, even though the computer, the operating system, Windows, can’t see it anymore.
PS Now, obviously, this is a very useful tool because people often do delete stuff they want to get back, but how come a guy like you is interested in this kind of thing? Is it because you’re an A-grade nincompoop and you were deleting files that you wanted or was there some sort of historical background of why you might want to go searching for data?
GH Oh, look, it comes from my background. I spent ten years in the Federal Police. Most of that time was based in Sydney, and a large part of that time I spent working with a computer crime unit. Our job, essentially, was not only to investigate computer crime but to go out and chase computer hackers and all those other types of telecommunications fraud, but it was also to go out and assist other operational teams going out and executing search warrants and seizing computer equipment. That could have been on a fraud case or a drugs case or any sort of case that we were investigating.
PS …in the age of child pornography and all those sorts of things?
GH Oh, all those sorts of matters and Commonwealth offences. Being part of the Federal Police, a lot of that had to do with we’ve seized someones computer, how do we process it as evidence? How do you collect that evidence and present it before the court? So, of course their interested in deleted files. That’s often where the evidence is. So a lot of our techniques and skills were developed for the purposes of recovering data in court cases. I left the Federal Police in 1997 and went out and did the same sort of work in the private sector for PriceWaterhouseCoopers. We did the major investigations like HIH and OneTel and, again, we were seizing massive volumes of data and part of our search was to look at the deleted information so we had to have the ability to recover that data in the first place. I was also employed as running the team at PriceWaterhouseCoopers and some of my colleagues were out of the New South Wales Police computer crime area, and we always knew that the techniques that we were using — in the commercial world for actual data recovery, if you’d simply just lost your files, there was nothing that was really like it. So we sat down over a beer one night and thought, you know, we could commercialise this technology and…
PS It’s funny how beer is a stimulant to great thoughts, isn’t it, mate?
GH It is! There’s been great business decisions made over a beer, at least in our case. And so we wrote our first program, Recover My Files, and we wrote it in our own time and got it out there on the internet and started selling it online and it had quite quick success. We started getting sales quite quickly and the program developed and eventually it got to the stage were we left our real jobs, so to speak, and that’s how GetData started.
PS We’re talking to Graham Henley from a company called GetData. Now, I’ve said in your intro, you’ve had success in Europe and Japan and the USA. Tell us about that success.
GH Well, our global success has been based on the internet. Still at this time we sell 75 percent of our product on the internet, and a large percentage of our market is the US and quickly followed by Europe. In fact, Australia only represents about five percent of our online sales so we really set ourselves out to be a global company. Of course, the internet gives you that opportunity to target international markets all over the world. Now, following up from our internet success we started getting approached by retail distributors saying we’ve seen your software, we think there’s promise for a retail product in our market. The first one we went with was the Japanese distribution, and that was really fantastic to work with. It took — from the time a Japanese company contacted us, once we had gone through the due diligence of deciding they were the right fit for us — it was 13 weeks before we had the software completely translated and out on the Japanese retail shelf. And, of course, in Japan where the internet is not so much a selling tool, it’s a more of a research tool, the retail market does very well. And that was followed by the French, Dutch, German versions, and then we chose a distributor in the US and have retail distribution right through the US and the major US stores. Last but not least, the last one that we’ve done is the Australian distribution through a distributor Lako Pacific, who are based in Melbourne, and they’ve put our product into all the major Australian retail stores such as Harvey Norman, Dick Smith’s, etcetera.
PS So, Recover My Files is your best selling product?
GH Recover My Files is our best selling product. Part of our business strategy, of course, was we developed this fantastic data recovery product and we had lots of other ideas and we’re still not short of ideas for new products. We have developed ten other products. Recover My Files, we found in that market there was a distinct separation from people who wanted to recover their hard drives — say, if you accidentally deleted files or if you formatted your hard drive or if your hard drive had fallen over for some reason — that market was distinct from people using digital cameras. So we decided that we could make a product called Recover My Photos which was specifically targeted for people to recover they digital photos. Rubbed off of that, a different market at a cheaper price, and that’s what the Recover My Photos product is. And of course, now, with popularity of things such as Ipods, we may even consider making again a separate product called Recover My Ipod or something similar purely to target that niche market that’s just exploded around the world.
PS Well, given the fact that you very kindly gave some smart alec sitting on the plane a great idea, what’s your rivalry like? Are there companies out in the world who are in your same space and how are you doing against them?
GH We’re doing very well. I would say that if you were to search on the internet then you could probably find 20 other recovery products. Now, there’s probably five serious competitors for us and we are definitely in the top five. Some of them are quite good products — they may get your data back. The useful thing about the internet is that you can download and try more products and particularly with the Recover My Files, one of our marketing successes is that you can use the trial version of our program when you download it and it will actually allow you to see the contents of your files to actually read the documents.
PS So they are there?
GH To look at the pictures, so you can be one hundred percent certain that the program has found your files. Then, if you register the program, you’re going to get them back.
PS So you sort of tantalise them and show them it’s there but you have to pay the price to get it?
GH That’s right. That’s how it works.
PS I figure a lot of your market would also be very busy small business people who haven’t backed up properly. They make all those sorts of mistakes and they need to get this file and it’s there for them and, ultimately, yours is the solution for that problem?
GH That’s right. Look, most small businesses don’t have a good backup regime and it’s difficult for them if they’ve lost their data to find a solution that’s going to be quick and one hundred percent reliable to get them back up and running before they start losing money. That’s just how a small business operates. And again, interestingly, we found in the big corporates that people who have accidentally lost files within a big corporate, the usual procedure — and I know this from working in a place like PriceWaterhouseCoopers — is that you have to go to your IT department who have to request a set of backup tapes that usually come in from off site and then they load the backup tapes, etcetera, etcetera. That can take up a lot of time.
PS And you get a lot of eye rolling from the IT people like “how could you lose this? Why weren’t you backing up?”
GH You do. So, Recover My Files has found a market there because, simply, people say “I’ve lost this information. I want to quickly run it on my computer and see if I can get it back” and so it’s worked quite well in that environment as well.
PS So, if someone wants to tap into what you’re doing, what’s your website?
GH Our company website is GetData that g-e-t-d-a-t-a, www.getdata.com. Our main product, as I mentioned, is Recover My Files and that’s www.recovermyfiles,com les.com
PS Graham, thanks for joining is on Talking Business.
GH Pleasure. Thanks for having me.