I stopped by the Diskeeper booth yesterday to catch up on their latest defragmentation and file recovery products. I spoke with Daylen Farkas, VP of channel and consumer sales, who mentioned that a new version of Undelete--their file recovery and application--will be available soon.
"Undelete 2009 should be available in Q3 2008, and will include a number of new features," says Farkas. "We're adding our invisitasking technology to the Undelete product family, as well as the ability to perform cross-network deletions, all driven by an enhanced user interface."
Farkas also discussed Diskeeper's Intelligent File Access Acceleration Sequencing Technology (I-FAAST), which is available in certain Diskeeper disk defrgamentation products.
"I-FAAST learns about the disk performance and file access of a given system, then relies on this information to speed up file access," says Farkas. "I-FAAST takes usage patterns into account, then incorporates that information into the background defrag processes.
I also asked Farkas about Diskeeper's continued expansion into China, which began with the opening of a new Diskeeper office in Hong Kong last month. Diskeeper already has a distribution network in place in the region, but Farkas says that the new office should help the company build market share and presence in the fast-growing asian market.
It's an interesting notion of social compliance that Diskeeper happily does business with the Chinese Communist Party and any other questionable entity but has allegedly refused to sell their products to, or offer technical support to, pharmaceutical companies that manufacture certain psychotropic drugs that offend the Church of Scientology. Perhaps someone can repudiate the reports that Diskeeper did this with Glaxo, but if true I think it casts doubts on whether this is a company I’d want to do business with. I’d certainly think twice about a company that allowed the ideological prejudices of its executives to preclude it from, for example, refusing to hire gay employees or refusing to do business with Israeli companies. Anyone prepared to make me feel better about Diskeeper as a company?
This isn't just about making a ethical point either. I'd hesitate to recommend a Diskeeper product to a client if there was some possibility that they might pull technical support owing to an ideological whim.