RevSoft Signs Kantion as Global Distributor, Eyes US Expansion

January 15, 2013 Alex Woodie

RevSoft, an Australian developer of job schedulers and management tools for IBM i and other platforms, has signed a partnership deal with fellow Aussie firm Kantion IT to set up channels and sell RevSoft products around the world. Putting Kantion in charge of singing up resellers in international markets frees RevSoft to make a bigger push into the US market this year.

Kantion IT managing director Richard Bryett knows a thing or two about IBM i management tools. From 2005 to 2011, Bryett sold Help/Systems products, first as a sales associate at eveLogic, and then as managing director of Help/Systems International Pty. after Help/Systems acquired eveLogic in 2008.

After leaving Help/Systems International Pty in 2011, Bryett formed Kantion IT in the city of Melbourne in May 2012. He established a partnership deal with Trader’s, the French IBM i high availability software company. Then he set out to find another product to sell, which led him to a meeting with John Massey, CEO of RevSoft.

“When I sat down with John and took a look at his product, it ticked all the boxes in terms of a new product to take into market,” Bryett tells IT Jungle, “and not just for IBM i, which we all know and love and trust, but also for other platforms as well.”

RevSoft sells a range of systems automation tools that work with IBM i and other platforms, including REV SCHEDULER, REV MESSAGE, REV VIEW, REV DATAFLOW, REV GUARDIAN; and REV DISK.

The new partnership pits Bryett against his former employer, which happens to be the biggest IBM i systems automation software company in the world. Help/Systems enjoys a comfortable cushion in the market for IBM i job schedulers, and offers automation solutions in many other disciplines as well.

Going Native

There’s no doubt the partnership wants to succeed against Help/Systems in IBM i deals. But the opportunities won’t stop outside of IBM i shops. One big factor in Bryett’s decision to team up with Massey and RevSoft was that the RevSoft products run natively not just on IBM i but also on Windows, Linux, Unix, and mainframe. Another factor is RevSoft’s software subscription model.

There are no pure IBM i shops anymore, and IT professionals demand a way to control those others servers without duplicating efforts. “The real conversation we’re having is they’d rather be running one tool that is running natively on different platforms–running natively on IBM i, Windows, Linux, Unix, Red Hat, Solaris, HP-UX. Getting that standardization on one tool is the talking point,” Bryett says.

Massey says RevSoft surprises prospects when company reps show up for a demo with the RevSoft job scheduler running on a laptop, and tells the prospect that the same product can be used for the mainframe or the IBM i server.

“Scheduling seems to be the big major area for hurt for a lot of companies,” Massey says, “whether because they don’t have scheduling and want to schedule now … or they do scheduling, but wonder why it isn’t the same on every platform. Why doesn’t the scheduler on AIX talk to Windows? Why doesn’t iSeries scheduler talk to anything else? Why can’t I have one scheduler that is the same on all platforms and they can all communicate when and if required, regardless of the operating systems? If I have one model that works the same on every platform, then I have one education plan, and one group of people can do everything rather than having specialist in certain areas.”

Bryett also likes RevSoft’s subscription model, which starts at $125 per month per server for the job scheduler on a P05 box, with no LPAR restrictions. The subscription model works to customers’ advantage, Massey says. It follows IBM’s tier-based pricing scheme, which customers are comfortable with, without penalizing them for using multiple LPARs. “I think that’s been very successful for us,” Massey says. “We haven’t had anybody come back to us and say the pricing was not appropriate because we don’t price for LPAR.”

Empire Building

Kantion IT will market and sell the RevSoft products in every region except the US. While the company will sell directly to customers, a big initiative for Kantion at the moment is setting up reseller channels in different regions. It already has established partnerships with two resellers to carry the RevSoft line in the UK and Ireland.

“We are distributors in Australia and New Zealand, and are in the process of creating channels in the overseas territories,” Bryett says. “Right now there’s certainly a lot of energy into appointing distributors abroad, as well as servicing the sales opportunities in the domestic market here.”

Meanwhile, Massey will focus more on building RevSoft’s presence in the US in 2013. Currently the company employs one person in the Orlando, Florida, office. Massey wants to grow that office considerably, adding another four or five positions and turning Orlando into a technical support center.

“That’s my pet market for 2013. It’s something we have to do correctly,” Massey says. “We’ve kept putting it off and putting it off. We still get sales from not having a large US office [but] we know we can do the job a heck of a lot better, and that’s what I’m focused on this year.”