Recently, Computer Technology Review sat down with Vision Solutions’ CEO, Nicolaas Vlok. Vision Solutions provides high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) software for IBM Power Systems. At age 21, Vlok originally founded a computer hardware and network integration company, IDION, when he was an engineering student at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. Later, IDION acquired Vision Solutions and grew the company until 2006, when it was purchased by private equity fund manager, Thoma Bravo.
- Briefly explain how your technology fits into the high-availability marketplace. Vision Solutions is a worldwide provider of high availability and disaster recovery software for IBM Power Systems – primarily across IBM i and AIX operating systems. We’re IBM’s only Premier Business Partner in business resiliency with 90 percent of the IBM i HA install base. Our 400+ employees support more than 6,000 customers and protect 22,000 servers across 70 countries. We also have a mature, global channel consisting of 450 business partners and more than 4,000 consultants have been trained on Vision products and solutions.
- What makes your technology unique? The maturity of our solutions coupled with continuous innovations makes our products the best in the marketplace (we’ve been serving this market with HA and DR products since 1990). This means our technology is field tested and offers robust functionality, flexibility and reliability. Another area where we excel is in automation and ease of use. We have driven enough simplicity into the operation of our solutions so that daily management is literally measured in minutes -- customers like to “set it and forget it” -- and we do not require an expert technology resource to manage our solutions.
- Who uses your technology? Our solutions are in use across virtually all vertical industries but we have particular strength in sectors such as manufacturing and transportation, as well as financial services and health-care where regulatory compliance issues often drive availability requirements. While you will recognize many of our customers as household names, 85 percent of our customer base is in mid-market sectors.
- What do you see as currently the biggest challenge for IT management in the high-availability and disaster recovery marketplace? The constant issue we hear from customers is the increasing need to be more productive with less resources. High availability and disaster recovery solutions remain boardroom topics for C-level executives; however, there often are not adequate personnel or budgetary resources to protect system and data assets. This is a key reason we have invested so heavily in the autonomics and ease-of-use capabilities.
- How do you see the HA/DR technology transforming for future data centers? One area of significant change wherein we are already seeing this occur is in the area of virtualization. As data centers become more virtualized, it is important for HA/DR solutions to adapt. However, virtualization can still be vulnerable to incidents like a site failure, so HA/DR solutions that can easily provide an off-site backup capability need to be part of the overall data center and DR planning effort.
- What is your product roadmap? Vision Solutions' product portfolio has never been stronger with robust offerings for high availability, systems management, and data management. Vision Solutions provides high availability and disaster recovery solutions for the IBM Power platform on AIX, i, under the iTERA, MIMIX, ORION, Cluster1, EchoStream, and EchoCluster brands. Our product roadmap continues to reflect our commitment to protect our existing customer's investment in these product families, while we also invest in next generation solutions for both the SMB and Enterprise markets. On the System i front, iTERA is the industry leading HA product for the SMB space and we will continue to make investments in iTERA to make sure it continues to be the SMB HA industry leader. For our enterprise customers, we will continue to support our MIMIX and ORION Solutions, while leveraging the best of all of our HA solutions to deliver a new enterprise HA product with unprecedented performance, ease-of-use, and flexibility in the 2010 timeframe.
For customers who are looking to enhance their recovery options beyond standard tape saves, but are not quite ready to step up to full two-system HA solutions, Vision offers an entry level, single system recovery solution called iTERA Vault. For customers looking for system management products, Vision also has Vision DataManger, a product that performs intelligent archival of complex production databases without downtime, and Vision Director, which provides continuous “health checks” and optimizes systems for peak performance and DASD optimization. Customers requiring tools that enable them to more easily share information between incompatible applications and disparate platforms, Vision Replicate1 provides a data transformation service to easily share data across a variety of systems and applications.
Collaboration with the IBM Rochester labs has been, and will continue to be, a critical component of our roadmap strategy as we work hand-in-hand to make sure we provide high-value complementary solutions. Three specific initiatives demonstrate the value of this relationship. Vision recently announced a reseller agreement with IBM that offers our Vision Cluster1 product directly through IBM sales. On the technology front it is worth noting that Cluster1 has been integrated with System i Director Navigator, so customers can manage Cluster1 from the same interface they use to manage their System i. Last but not least, Vision was selected as a Cornerstone business partner to participate in the launch of IBM's Smart Business Platform.
- It’s 2018…what does Vision Solutions look like? We are continuing our tradition of staying close to customers, expanding our innovative product portfolio to invest further in distribution efforts enabling us to capitalize on traditional and emerging market opportunities.
