Maxava Officially Becomes Maxava

September 13, 2010 Alex Woodie

The IBM i high availability software company previously known as Maximum Availability last week announced it has officially shortened its name to Maxava. In addition to being easier to say than the old nine-syllable name, Maxava hopes that, by formally adopting the three-syllable nickname that many people (including this newsletter) often used, it will shake up previously held notions about the company and the enterprise-strength capability of its high availability products.

The new company name is the tip of the iceberg of changes occurring at Maxava, the New Zealand-based company that has been successful in selling IBM i high availability software around the world for the last decade, and which is now reporting steady inroads into the lucrative U.S. market.

For starters, Maxava has replaced the name of its IBM i high availability suite. The old *noMAX name is out, and the new Maxava HA name is in. The various editions of the *noMAX product, Sentry, Defender, and Garrison, have been replaced with Maxava HA Data Stream, Maxava HA SMB, and Maxava HA Enterprise, respectively.

The company has also rolled out a new Web site that features new graphics and a new look. The new URL, www.maxava.com, will be a much easier to type than www.maximumavailability.com, especially for fat-fingered mobile device users. A new logo and a new marketing campaign are also part of the revamp for the company, which has U.S. headquarters in Irvine, California. Maxava also signed up an Irvine-based PR agency, Madison Alexander, to guide contacts with the media and to help shape perceptions of the company.

Maxava is sharpening its image in the hopes of changing the perception that its products are best for small and mid-sized (SMB) shops, says company president Allan Campbell. The company has about 500 customers around the world, and won at least one contract with a Fortune 500 company in the U.S. this spring, senior vice president Simon O’Sullivan told The Four Hundred earlier this summer.

“While we have always built software for the most complex enterprise environments, and we have many very successful enterprise as well as SMB customers, our success in the SMB sector has perhaps fed the perception that Maxava only provides SMB solutions,” Campbell says in a press release. “We are confident that the new branding more accurately reflects our position as a major player with HA/DR solutions across the entire IBM i customer spectrum, and now the only major, fully dedicated IBM i, HA vendor in the market.”

That last bit by Campbell is a dig at Vision Solutions, a fellow IBM i high availability software company that has its world headquarters in Irvine. Vision recently acquired Double-Take Software, which developed Windows clustering technologies. Vision had been a Double-Take reseller for years prior to the acquisition, and would surely contest a claim that it’s not fully dedicated to the IBM i market (not that the companies want to embark in any more legal tussles).

In any event, the rebranding shows a more aggressive Maxava will be trying to steal some of large IBM i HA accounts that Vision has all but cornered thanks to its acquisitions of iTera and Lakeview Technology over the years.

“We are very clear about our objectives as a company and for the last decade, we have been developing IBM i HA software for many of the world’s largest and most demanding enterprise customers,” Campbell states. “Our new branding is designed to focus on these key elements; quality, robust, reliable solutions that are simple to use, the very best IBM i HA software built for the toughest enterprise environments and accessible to all IBM i shops.”

Every big unveiling needs some freebies, and Maxava did not disappoint in this regard. The company is giving away licenses to maxView, the graphical console that gives users easy access to pieces of data that are important for successfully completing an HA rollover, such as data replication status, disk utilization, job status, and communication link status.

maxView, which runs in a Web browser and on iPhones, iPads, and Blackberrys, was previously available only to users of Maxava’s high-end product (Maxava HA Enterprise, formerly *noMAX Garrison). Now, it’s available to anybody as a free download from Maxava’s Web site at www.maxava.com.

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