Vision Re-Brands HA Portfolio Under ‘Availability’ Moniker

February 15, 2011 Alex Woodie

Vision Solutions is renaming some of its products to better reflect its breadth of solutions following last year’s acquisition of Double-Take Software. High availability (HA) solutions will be grouped under the “Availability” name, while disaster recovery (DR) products will be labeled “RecoverNow.”

The current round product renaming kicked off last year when Vision launched MIMIX Availability 7, its new flagship HA product that combines code acquired from Lakeview Technology with Vision’s own ORION HA product line.

At some point in the last couple of months, Vision changed the name of its entry-level IBM i HA solution, which was previously called iTERA HA (and known as Echo2 before Vision’s parent company, Thoma Bravo, acquired the Salt Lake City, Utah, software developer and merged it with Vision). Now, Vision calls this product iTERA Availability.

The Irvine, California, company is making a similar name change with its HA products for AIX. Later this week, Vision will announce the latest release of its Double-Take Availability offering, which will now include the AIX HA technology formerly known as EchoStream and EchoCluster.

Vision has been selling a product called Double-Take Availability since the acquisition last year. Company executives found Double-Take’s naming convention more descriptive than the HA acronym that Vision previously used, and so it decided to adopt the name “availability” across its product set, Vision product marketing manager Bill Hammond says.

“We found that the customers in the open systems space were actually very familiar with the Double-Take brand, and we feel this change will give us additional visibility and recognition in our AIX selling effort,” Hammond says regarding the name change away from EchoStream and EchoCluster, which are products that Lakeview acquired in 2003.

The one exception to Vision’s new “availability” naming rule is OMS/ODS. This is the name that Vision now uses to sell the product formerly known as ORION, which is the original Vision HA product that’s been around for more than 20 years and installed in thousands of organizations. The company abandoned the ORION name with last year’s launch of MIMIX Availability 7, which is more MIMIX than ORION, but a blend of both nevertheless.

Now, Vision is going back to its roots with OMS/ODS, which probably won’t be a big seller to new shops, as Vision will lead with MIMIX Availability for enterprise needs and iTERA Availability for entry-level shops and mid-size businesses. Interestingly, lots of Vision’s old customers still refer to the software as OMS/ODS, so it won’t be a big change for them. (And maybe IBM will rename the platform AS/400, and perhaps pigs can fly?)

Vision is also re-branding all of its DR products under the RecoverNow name. The RecoverNow name previously referred to software that only ran on IBM i. Today, it offers two versions, including MIMIX RecoverNow for the IBM i OS, and Double-Take RecoverNow for the Windows, Unix, and Linux world.

In other news, Vision last week launched a version of iTERA Availability designed for Italy. The product is based on an existing English-language version that’s been translated into Italian. The move marks a broadening of Vision’s worldwide support and presence, says Mads Toubro, senior vice president with Vision Solutions.