| QUESTION & ANSWER |
iTera, Vision look at future of high availability |
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By Mark Fontecchio, News Writer
20 Nov 2006 | Search400.com |
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Earlier this month, Vision Solutions and iTera, two of System i's biggest high-availability vendors, announced that they would be merging. The combined company will have 3,000 customers and about 13,000 implementations of one of their high-availability software programs.
We spoke to Nicolaas Vlok, CEO of the new company, and Dan Neville, sales vice president, about what the iTera-Vision product would look like, when users will see it, and what kind of support current customers can expect down the road. What benefit does this merger have for iTera and Vision users?
Dan Neville: Our technologies will work well together. I think that we see that the experience that Vision has in the marketplace, and the time they've been in the marketplace would absolutely benefit iTera users and vice versa. We think iTera has new technologies and solutions to benefit Vision high-availability customers.
Nicolaas Vlok: One thing I'm really excited about is the leading innovation of iTera. It has probably been leading the pack in terms of ease of use, reliability and just the way they've approached some of the new IBM technologies. We think from an iTera perspective, they have some very thought-out processes, and we think that taking that from services and support, and introducing it to the Vision global organization can create efficiencies.
When you merge the companies, what product comes out the other end?
Neville: It will be some of each, most certainly. We do intend to merge our two technologies and bring them together. We do have a release coming out in the first quarter of next year that will start to do this.
Vlok: That should move the needle quite significantly. That will be the yardstick by which we measure future releases by. We're going to take thoughts into products and really take it to the next level for customers.
What about support for current customers then?
Neville: We will continue to support and enhance those solutions as we bring a merged product together. One of the things they want to make sure we do is that they not lose any high-availability coverage as we move them to new versions of the software. So even if we do something aggressive with the new product, we can figure out a way to make sure systems are still replicating while they are upgrading to the new technology.
What do you mean by enhancing current solutions? Does that mean future releases could be just iTera or just Vision, or will they be both?
Neville: To start off with it will be both. We will continue to move the product along. We would like to present customers with a seamless upgrade, and customers will get a bit of both in their product. Ultimately, they end up with the best technology possible.
What is the future of the high-availability market on System i?
Neville: When iTera came to the marketplace, of the 250,000 businesses running iSeries, only a handful, really, were running high availability. We wanted to create a solution that was affordable and incredibly easy to use. I think high availability has gotten a kind of bad name in the market in terms of expense, hard to use. Our goal is to bring solutions to the world that everyone can afford, so there wouldn't be a company in the world that couldn't afford high availability.
Vlok: We want to take some of that technology and really make it global alongside the technologies we have developed.
Let us know what you think about the story; e-mail: Mark Fontecchio, News Writer
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