On November 2, 2006, Vision Solutions and iTera, two leading System i high availability vendors, announced the finalization of their acquisition and merger by Thoma Cressey Equity Partners. The merged company operates as Vision Solutions, with the iTera name being retained in the company's product branding.
The reaction to the merger has been very favorable in the System i marketplace. In an interview conducted in late December 2006, Nicolaas Vlok, CEO of the merged company, stated, "We're seeing more sales now than the total of the two companies before the merger. We will probably see more new customers in the current quarter than in any quarter of the combined histories of the two companies."
Dan NeVille, executive vice president of sales and marketing, offered an explanation as to why the whole has been greater than the sum of the parts. "The market is very excited about the merger. They see the tremendous value that will come from joining the strengths of Vision and iTera. As a result, a lot of companies that had been holding back have stepped up to buy their high availability solutions now."
A Marriage of the Best In Each
The predecessor companies' products achieved a similar objective—high availability—but there were significant differences in how they did so. Vision's particular strength was in addressing the needs of complex environments. With considerable autonomics and support for exceptionally high transaction volumes and leading-edge technologies and methodologies, Vision's ORION Data Center Edition supports the requirements of the most demanding of enterprises. iTera's primary strengths were in the areas of ease-of-use and affordability. By combining minimal monitoring and maintenance requirements with a relatively low sticker price, iTera's Echo2 delivers a significantly lower total cost of ownership than other high availability products. The merged company is now well advanced in fusing those strengths to produce best-of-breed products for the benefit of current and future customers.The merger of the companies was under discussion for some time before being announced publicly. This contributed to the short turnaround time required to deliver a converged product, but another reason for the rapid progress is that the merger is working well internally. Because the two research and development departments had similar cultures, they clicked quickly. Consequently, the company plans a January 2007 start for beta testing of a converged product. The product, which will be branded as iTera HA Edition V5, is expected to be released in the first quarter of 2007.
Sales of the iTera HA Edition V5 high availability solution will initially be directed at new customers. To meet the needs of existing customers, Vision will continue to support, maintain, and upgrade ORION and Echo2 for the foreseeable future. Vision expects that most customers will eventually want to migrate to iTera HA Edition V5 because, in addition to all of the best-of-breed functionality from the predecessor products, it will include significant new features that Vision and iTera had in development prior to the merger. However, Vision will not actively encourage customers to make the move until it can ensure a migration path that is at least as easy as an upgrade within a single product line.
One example of an iTera feature that was under development prior to the merger is patent-pending self-healing functionality. For some time, high availability products have offered synchronization checking and correction processes to deal with the problem of corrupted data, but these processes normally work at a file or library level. When out-of-synch data is detected, the entire file or library has to be restored. This can be a problem for particularly large files and libraries. In some cases, the only practical solution is to restore the backup database from tape, which leaves systems vulnerable during the hours—or, in some cases, days—until the restore processes can be completed.
iTera HA Edition V5's new self-healing feature eliminates this problem. It allows the backup database to be resynchronized at the record level, rather than the file or library level. When a transaction occurs on the production system and is applied on the backup, iTera HA Edition V5 will perform a real-time compare between the primary and backup databases to ensure synchronization. If necessary, iTera HA Edition V5 will then resynchronize any corrupted data at the record level. All of this will happen automatically, without the need for operator intervention.
Ease of Use Is Paramount
Ease-of-use will be paramount in iTera HA Edition V5. Because it will be almost entirely automated, most customers will likely spend no more than an average of five minutes a day to monitor and administer it. Vision is very excited about what this will do for the economics of high availability. "There isn't a company in the world that won't be able to afford to implement high availability," exclaimed NeVille.The merger will also result in new products being made available to new and current customers. For example, Vision expects to launch iTera Vault in the same timeframe as iTera HA Edition V5. iTera Vault is a lower-cost solution that provides disk-to-disk data saves, possibly at a remote location. It is intended for businesses that can withstand some downtime but want to recover within a few hours without any loss of data or transactions.
What will being a member of the Thoma Cressey family mean for Vision in the future? A look at Thoma Cressey's moves in the System i market suggests that it will likely attempt to leverage synergies among its various acquisitions. Prior to the Vision and iTera acquisitions, its System i portfolio already included JDA and NetIQ. After the merger, Thoma Cressey acquired an equity interest in Sirius Computing Solutions, a major System i solution provider. It seems reasonable to assume that these sibling companies will look for ways to leverage each other's strengths for their own and their customers' benefit.
Joel Klebanoff is a consultant, a writer, president of Klebanoff Associates, Inc., a Toronto, Canada-based marketing communications firm, and author of BYTE-ing Satire. Joel has 25 years experience working in IT, first as a programmer/analyst and then as a marketer. He holds a Bachelor of Science in computer science and an MBA, both from the University of Toronto. Contact Joel at
Vision Solutions, Inc.
17911 Von Karman
Irvine, CA 92614
Tel: 949.253.6500
Fax: 949.253.6501
Web: www.visionsolutions.com
Email:
Joel Klebanoff is a consultant, writer, and formerly president of Klebanoff Associates, Inc., a Toronto-based marketing communications firm. He has 30 years' experience in various IT capacities and now specializes in writing articles, white papers, and case studies for IT vendors and publications across North America. Joel is also the author of BYTE-ing Satire, a compilation of a year's worth of his columns. He holds a BS in computer science and an MBA, both from the University of Toronto.
MC Press books written by Joel Klebanoff available now on the MC Press Bookstore.
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