SafeData Says Sales Doubled in 2006, Should Do It Again in 2007

Published: Month 19, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Here's the kind of story that the System i5 community would like to hear more of. SafeData, a provider of data recovery and high availability services specifically geared to OS/400 and i5/OS shops, said that it doubled its revenues in 2006.

Peter Briggs, as president of privately held SafeData, did not say how much sales the company took down in 2006, but did say that sales were "in the millions." Over the past few years, SafeData has transitioned itself from an implementer of Lakeview Technology's MIMIX high availability and related software products into a service provider that offers HA and data recovery services to companies that want such capability, but who do not want to invest in backup systems. Several years ago, when SafeData became a partner of upstart HA software provider iTera, now part of Vision Solutions after private equity firm Thoma Cressey bought both companies last year, the company was asked to do a hosted environment for HA and data recovery, and then the company's managers decided to do this as a business instead of trying to sell HA software licenses and iSeries and i5 boxes. Clearly, this was a good move.

Briggs says that the company has 34 customers so far, and is adding about five a month, which should mean that sales double again in 2007. About two-thirds of the company's revenues come from its SafeData/HA product, which uses high availability clustering software (both iTera HA and MIMIX) to provide offsite HA clustering to shops. Most of the remaining third of its sales in 2006 came from its SafeData/DR product, which is a subscription-based data replication and disk restoration service that is not as expensive as full high availability, but which allows customers to recover from a crash that wipes out their data in 10 hours or less. This product is offered in partnership with eVault, and looking ahead, Briggs is anticipating that it will make up a larger piece of the pie in 2007.

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