Vision Solutions Sorts Out Executive Jobs, Product Plans After iTera Acquisition

Published: November 27, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

High availability software maker Vision Solutions, which was acquired by private equity firm Thoma Cressey Equity Partners at the end of September, convinced that equity firm to pony up the cash to buy rival iTera at the beginning of this month. A few weeks after the announcement, Vision Solutions, as the merged HA firms are known, announced which executives from both firms would do what jobs at the company.

The company had already said that Nicolaas Vlok, who was the managing director of Idion Technology Holdings, the company that bought Vision Solutions in March 2000, would be the chief executive officer of the new Vision Solutions. Dan NeVille, who was one of the two founders of iTera and who was its chief executive officer, has been named senior vice president of sales and marketing at Vision Solutions. Alan Arnold, who was Vision Solutions' chief technology officer for many years and who was elevated to the title of president and chief operating officer prior to the acquisitions, also has the title of executive vice president as well as being designated chief technology officer of the combined companies. Arnold will be driving the integration of Vision Solutions and iTera, including its technology and services. Henry Martinez was CTO after Arnold was bumped up to president at the earlier Vision Solutions, is sharing the title of senior vide president of engineering with Kent Macdonald, the other founder of iTera who was that company's CTO before the merger. Don Scott, who was chief financial officer at Vision before all of the acquisition activity, remains in that role.

Right now, Vision Solutions has two products: the Orion 2.0 high availability suite from the Vision side and the Echo2 4.2 suite from the iTera side. "We have two great products and will continue to invest in both of those product platforms," explains Arnold. "We continue to see a huge opportunity for the iTera HA products not only in the United States, where these products are the number one selling HA solution, but also in EMEA and Asia, where Vision has the best distribution network in the HA space. The Vision Orion product is installed in the biggest and most complex System i environments in the world and we will continue to invest and support these environments for our customers."

Vision Solutions says that it will put out enhanced releases of its products in the first quarter of 2007. Arnold says that the next version of its HA products will be called iTera High Availability 5.0. "The next version is going to take HA to another level and will include some of the first integration of the Vision and iTera advanced HA solutions. It's only going to get better," he says. A more detailed product roadmap is expected from Vision Solutions early next year.

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