Vision Continues Outward Transformation with ORION SE 6.4 Launch

Published: July 11, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Vision Solutions is on a quest. After more than a year of silence, the Southern California software company is now making announcements seemingly every week. Yesterday, the company shipped ORION Standard Edition (SE) version 6.4, a new release of the OS/400 high availability and systems management software acquired from OS Solutions last year. Vision's parent company also issued a warning to stockholders in June that it is in discussions with another company, a strong indication of pending M&A activity.

Things haven't necessarily been easy for Vision Solutions the last few years. The company was caught somewhat flatfooted by market newcomers sporting remote journaling-based solutions, which are less expensive and easier to manage than traditional OS/400 high availability solutions. Throw in a hostile takeover bid by competitor Datamirror lasting from 2002 to 2004, workforce cuts, and lawsuits by ex-employees, and the company, which is owned by publicly traded Idion Technology Holdings of South Africa, had plenty of distractions.

Things began to look up for Vision last year when it executed the acquisition of OS Solutions, an English and American developer of systems management tools and high availability software for the iSeries. Vision paid more than $2.7 million for OS Solutions, and was able to reap close to $1 million in revenue from its products in 2005, according to recent filings by Idion, which closed 2005 with a profit of about $730,000 on revenues of $33.3 million. This was a promising change from 2004, when Idion lost about $840,000 on revenues of $31.3 million. The company reported $32.8 million in revenue for 2003. Because Vision Solutions revenue is what makes up the bulk of Idion's revenue, these numbers show growth has been flat at Vision the last three years.

Now Vision is ramping up initiatives to reap even more revenues and profits from the OS Solutions acquisition, as well as from its two original high availability and database replication software lines. In late June, the company unveiled its OS/400 software portfolio for small and mid size businesses, the ORION SE suite, which includes all the software it obtained from OS Solutions. The company also recently obtained certification for its technical services professionals, another part of its business that Vision is looking to grow. These activities followed the launch of ORION Datacenter Edition version 1.2 Service Release 2 in early June (see "Vision Cuts Downtime Associated with HA Replication").

Yesterday, the company was due to begin delivery of ORION Standard Edition version 6.4, the former OS Solution suite of software that includes not only remote journaling high availability software, but two systems management utilities, called Director and Data Manager, as well.

There are three major areas of improvement to ORION SE 6.4, and these enhancements affect all three areas of the suite, according to Henry Martinez, Vision's chief technology officer. The first area has to do with performance. According to Martinez, Vision has boosted the performance of ORION SE by more than 200 percent. "We're always being asked to do more with less. We're always seeing people squeeze more work out of their iSeries," he says. "We're very pleased with being to reduce our CPU overhead that much."

Enhancements to ORION's GUI interface should make the suite easier to use, Martinez says. In particular, the GUI has been enhanced to show administrators the progress of disk reorganizations--a new feature that could even help developers write more efficient OS/400 programs, he adds.

Another ease-of-use feature added with ORION SE 6.4 is support for wireless, two-way Short Messaging Service (SMS) communication between an iSeries and a mobile phone, which could allow administrators to perform roll-swaps while they are away from the office. All that's required to use this new feature is a separate SMS gateway on an external Windows box to be set up.

The third major enhancement is support for independent auxiliary storage pools (iASPs) across the product suite. This is an important feature, Martinez says, because many OS/400 shops are turning to iASPs to help them manage OS/400 environments that include different versions of the same application.

Support for iASPs is also one of the steps that an OS/400 high availability software developer must take before introducing support for OS/400's new switched disk and cross-site mirroring (XSM) capabilities. Martinez says ORION Datacenter Edition already supports XSM, but the company hasn't released the functionality yet. "We're watching the evolution of XSM very closely," he says. "We may turn it on after some PTFs. Our position is we don't want to add any risk."

Lastly, ORION SE 6.4 will deliver additional language support. The product has been enabled for double bit character sets, and will support Japanese during the third quarter.

Vision wants its customers to use the two systems management tools--Director and Data Manager--along with the high availability component of the ORION SE suite, so it is bundling them onto the same CD-ROM, although they can be licensed separately. "They all play together to make for a better high availability environment," says Robert Shields, Vision's director of marketing.

"The capabilities we've had have been a closely guarded secret here. We wanted to change that and really get out to the market [the message that] this is a really unique offering," he says. "The message is that there's a solution provider out there that goes soup to nuts."

ORION SE 6.4 is available in two editions: an entry-level Express edition, and a Professional edition, which supports heavier transaction environments. Pricing for ORION SE begins at $5,000. Pricing for Director, Data Manager, and Integrator (Vision's database replication solution) start at $6,000.

In addition to developing new technologies and cranking up the volume on its PR and marketing initiatives, the Irvine, California, company is also pursuing new business opportunities, including a possible merger or acquisition.

On June 26, Idion issued a "cautionary announcement" that reads as follows: "Shareholders are advised that the Group has entered into discussions, which if successfully concluded may have a material effect on the price of the company's securities. Accordingly, shareholders are advised to exercise caution when dealing in the Company's securities until a further announcement is made."

The company was not able to provide more detail concerning the nature of the discussions before this issue of Four Hundred Stuff went to press.