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ALAN ARNOLD
Saving time and money
Following the acquisition of Double-Take Software, SNS Europe talks to Vision Solutions’ Chief Technology Officer, Alan Arnold, about how the two organisations will be integrated to continue to develop what he describes as ‘a great portfolio of high availability, disaster recovery, backup, and data transformation products’.
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SNS: Please provide brief background on the company’s evolution to date – when it started/why and what it has achieved thus far?
AA: Vision Solutions was founded in 1995 by a small team at a hospital in Southern California. At that time, they could not find a product on the market that would keep the hospital’s computer systems continuously running. Following their development work, they productised their work and made it available more widely. The team worked extremely hard, but after they continued to grow over the next few years, it was obvious to them that they did not have enough capital to keep pace with the international customer base they were selling to. In 2000, Vision Solutions was sold to Idion, a South African company that was headed up by Nicolaas Vlok. Shortly after, Nicolaas hired myself and many of the other senior management team that are still with Vision today.
In 2006, the Vision Solutions management team partnered with private equity firm Thoma Bravo to purchase
Vision
Solutions from Idion, and to execute an aggressive
acquisition strategy.
One of
the first companies we acquired was iTera, Inc., a well-known SMB High Availability company in the Americas.
The next company
acquired was Lakeview Technologies, which had the MIMIX line of high availability products.
The Vision
Solutions ORION product, combined with the MIMIX product, gave Vision the most advanced solutions in the industry to address the IBM Power Systems “i” platform (formally known as the AS/400).
With these three companies coming together,
Vision
possessed an impressive 85 per cent of the install base for high availability software running in the IBM Power Systems ”i” market, with over $100 million in annual revenue and nearly 6,000 worldwide customers. In the ensuing three years, we continued to grow by nurturing the IBM base while expanding our UNIX (AIX) offerings in advanced replication and clustering solutions, and cross-platform data sharing and transformation solutions.
Along the way it became clear the company was ready to make the leap to Windows and
AA: Our analysis points to a large and growing market for the foreseeable future. Businesses of all sizes are focused on improving the availability of critical applications, whether in the cloud or on-premise. A number of industries such as healthcare, financial services and retail will continue to have the more demanding availability requirements that Vision Solutions addresses. In fact, companies in nearly all industries are facing new regulations or service-level agreements that are driving the necessity for increased levels of data protection and
WWW.SNSEUROPE.COM WIN 2010
Linux so we could provide solutions to all the prominent IT platforms on the market.
In
July of 2010, after careful analysis of the Windows market, it became clear that Double-Take Software would complement the solutions Vision was offering its global customers.
With this latest
acquisition we now have over 25,000 worldwide customers, a global network of over 2,000 business partners and nearly 800 employees.
SNS: The company recently acquired Double-Take Software – what were the reasons behind this decision?
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