Maxava Sees Big Bump In HA Sales To New Customers–Again

May 21, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

High availability software maker Maxava says that more and more IBM i shops are getting savvy about protecting their critical application and data assets, and this is boosting the company’s sales as well as sales of new Power Systems iron running the IBM i operating system. This is good for the IBM i ecosystem and is a reflection of the fact that high availability cluster has always been one of the dominant drivers of server sales in the IBM midrange.

Maxava says that new customer business–as opposed to maintenance and licensing from its existing customer base–was up 30 percent in its fiscal year ended in March. Maxava is privately held and does not release its financial results to the public, but wanted to let the IBM i community know that its HA business is clipping right along. By the way, the company’s new customer business was up 30 percent in fiscal 2011, too, so this is a trend more than a spike.

The company, which is based in New Zealand but which has offices and partners around the globe selling and supporting its HA products, has done particularly well in the United States in fiscal 2012, with marquee accounts such as Sunkist, Carhartt, American Water, Hyundai, and Mizuno adopting its wares. “The USA has been a very strong performer for us with good growth across the board and with significant new accounts in the major enterprise area,” Simon O’Sullivan, senior vice president at Maxava, tells The Four Hundred. “We have successfully installed at or converted a number of large customers running top end ERP applications for i such as JDE and SAP.”

O’Sullivan says that the product sales split in the past fiscal year has been about 60 percent for the Maxava HA SMB tools and the remaining 40 percent for the Maxava HA Enterprise+ suite. “This shows that smaller IBM i customers are turning to real-time replication and they continue to move away from tape as their only DR plan,” says O’Sullivan. “We believe this is being driven by the need for stronger RPOs and RTOs and the zero tolerance for data loss.” That said, he adds that a “good number” of customers using its Enterprise suite have taken advantage of the free “customer loyalty” upgrade to Enterprise+ that Maxava is offering.

“We have been delighted to see growth in all markets, but some are having a tougher time of pulling out of recession than others.”

The good news for Maxava is that when customers buy its wares, they also usually get new iron. “We tend to see IBM i customers buying new hardware rather than using second-hand gear. This has helped our relationship with IBM and it helps support our premier partner status.”

This is particularly important given that IBM itself is selling its own PowerHA tools and rival Vision Solutions is trying to peddle its own wares and push new Power Systems iron to keep Big Blue’s attention, too. The midrange HA market has always been fiercely competitive, and that has not changed over the decades and it will not any time in the future, either. And that is good news for IBM i customers.

The cloud is also looming large in the HA software space these days, on the IBM i platform as well as on other platforms. Back in March, Maxava said that over 150 of its customers were running its HA software in one of a number of different clouds that are available to IBM i shops around the globe.