iTera Gets Thumbs Up in HA and DR Markets

Published: March 13, 2006

by Dan Burger

Of the high availability (HA) and data replication (DR) vendors that service the OS/400 customer base in North America and internationally, iTera has enjoyed a meteoric rise during these first few years of the 21st century. With its aggressive pricing, it has led a charge primarily into the small and midsize business (SMB) market, where few HA and DR vendors used to be found. Where iTera once traveled virtually unnoticed, it now has competitors on all flanks. Regardless of the increasing competition, iTera is still putting up some big numbers. The fact that the other vendors in this field are also doing well is an indication of the demand for these solutions.

Last week, the Salt Lake City-based company announced a 64 percent increase in gross revenue during 2005 and 600 new sales of licenses of its Echo2 high availability software. (It's not often that privately held companies make such figures available, and because they such companies are private, we have to take their word for what their financials are.) Dan NeVille, iTera's president, attributes his company's success to the demand from companies of all sizes for system continuity, which can be demonstrated to help both the top and bottom lines at companies of all shapes and sizes. There is emphasis on the "companies of all sizes" description because iTera's customers are not exclusively from the SMB space. Eleven months ago, iTera was reporting its 2004 revenues were up 200 percent and it had added 500 new customers, by the way.

"Our goal is to make it easier for companies of all sizes to enjoy the benefits of a mirrored environment with switchover/failover capabilities," NeVille says with regard to the year ahead. "Because of our new pricing models, multi-platform, and hosting capabilities, as well as a stream of technological innovations, we expect our license base to double during 2006."

As every year passes, downtime gets to be less tolerated, whether planned or unplanned. For more and more companies, system downtime results in frustrated customers, suppliers, and employees that need access to current data on a 24x7 basis, or something close to it. Without this greatly improved accessibility, some companies are measuring their revenue losses in terms of tens of thousands or even millions of dollars. The days when businesses relied on staff to back up data during the night shift or on the weekend are no longer applicable for many organizations.

Higher degrees of data availability would predictably mean increasing success for iTera, and for HA and DR customers, it should bring lower prices as the competitors in this market keep the pressure on each other.