The HA and DR solution provider for the IBM midrange has picked up many new customers to whom it plans to cross sell its expanded product line.
Vision Solutions' announcement last week that it will acquire Double-Take Software nearly doubles the size of the IBM midrange market's largest high availability vendor and gives Vision a suite of multi-platform solutions that it can cross-sell into a combined market of some 25,000 customers.
The deal, valued at an estimated $242 million, was originally announced last May and subsequently sparked a reaction from some of Double-Take's shareholders, who had seen the public company's stock price slip from a high of around $25 a share at the start of the recession to about $13 a share in January 2009 and finally to $8.71 a share as the market deepened. Even Thoma Bravo's premium $10.55 per share offer, significantly above the then-current price, wasn't enough to pacify all stockholders. Though legal action was initiated, the Double-Take board of directors eventually resolved the complaints, and the sale moved forward to completion more or less on schedule. Stockholders holding 71 percent of the shares voted on the proposal.
Vision Solutions now has the task of integrating the company's employees, facilities, and products into its existing infrastructure. The first casualty of the acquisition is Double-Take President and CEO Dean Goodermote, who will be leaving the company shortly, according to Nicolaas Vlok, Vision's president and CEO. Other changes will be announced as the integration proceeds. Double-Take has its headquarters in Southborough, Massachusetts, but it also has facilities in Indiana, New Jersey, Canada, the UK, and France.
"It's a little early for us to go into much detail," said Vlok. "Over the next several weeks, we will be spending time at each of the sites, with the managers, formalizing our integration plans." Vlok said that unlike the prior Vision acquisitions of iTera and Lakeview, in which there were overlapping products, the Double-Take product line more elegantly complements Vision's existing products in the IBM midrange market. While Vision introduced a multi-platform solution back in 2003 with the Orion product line, Mimix and iTera have been its lead-in products—Mimix for the enterprise and iTera for the SMB market. The Orion name has since been lost due to a copyright infringement challenge from another software vendor, company officials confirmed with MC Press Online. The Orion products nevertheless are still serving numerous Vision customers and continue to be supported by the company.
Despite the fact that integration of Double-Take's physical assets is expected to take several months, Vision already has plans on incorporating its well-regarded brand into its existing product line.
"The Double-Take brand is a marketer's dream," said Ed Vesely, Vision's senior vice president of marketing and business development. "They have done a wonderful job of taking this to market and building a top-tier brand in the Windows-Linux marketplace. We intend to capitalize on that by extending the brand," Vesely said in announcing that Replicate 1, Vision's extract, transform, and load (ETL) product, will be rebranded Double-Take Share. The company's AIX EchoStream/EchoCluster solution will be rebranded Double-Take Availability and AIX EchoStream will be rebranded Double-Take RecoverNow. This conforms to the Double-Take branding for its Windows and Linux products that include Double-Take Availability for Windows and Double-Take Availability for Linux. Vision also has a disaster recovery product for IBM i called RecoverNow. Mimix and iTera will remain Vision's lead brands in the IBM i world.
Today's enterprise environments often are virtualized, and Vision sees virtualization more as an opportunity than a threat. While you can use virtualization to implement a high availability solution, it presents tricky problems that don't necessarily guarantee that your data will be preserved in every case should disaster occur. The greater the consolidation, the greater the risk should your main server ever fail. Vision sees that risk as an opportunity and has concluded that as enterprises consolidate, their need for high availability and server replication to another machine or geographic location just increases. Both Vision's existing products and the Double-Take products work will in a virtualized environment, according to Alan Arnold, Vision's executive vice president and chief technology officer.
"The majority of our customers today who are running Double-Take products are running them in a virtualized environment," says Arnold. "Everybody does that today, whether in the Windows world or in the System i world. You can replicate partitions, but if you want real-time replication of your data—up to the minute of a transaction boundary—you need to have real-time replication solutions like Vision and Double-Take products."
Beyond virtualization is the cloud, and Double-Take has been actively working on a solution to not only back up to the cloud, but fail over to the cloud. In other words, should your server go down, you can switch over and run your application from a cloud server. Double-Take already is doing that and has a solution in early release that is being used by a limited set of customers.
"Double-Take is very much on the leading edge for offering a cloud high-availability solution for customers today," said Arnold. "You would be replicating to the cloud, and if you lost your server, you could switch over to this virtualized partition in the cloud and run your application from the cloud. And you can also fail over to the cloud." Vision will be working on how to present the cloud solution to customers as it details its product roadmap over the next several months.
Says Vlok: "We think there is an opportunity to take the Double-Take product set and expand it to the IBM distribution world and gain further market penetration and increase the size of the market that Vision can address today through the products for Power Systems and Windows and Linux. We can now provide a significantly larger opportunity in terms of platforms. There will be an expanded customer base that we can either sell a new solution to or cross-sell our primary or secondary solutions," he said. "There is an opportunity to provide a single-vendor solution to the customer."
The future couldn't look brighter for Vision Solutions with its added product line. Now if only the economy would pick up a bit to help the company realize its full potential, a desire shared by the rest of the business community as well.
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