The Tokyo, Japan-based open source services and systems integration provider began trading as SIOS on November 6 and its new name, which stands for Software for Innovative Solutions and is representative of the fact that the company wants to be seen as a product and services provider, according to Tomofumi ‘Tommy’ Gotsubo, SIOS’s senior vice president of international business.
At the moment it is six months after the merger, it’s a learning process still, but how to grow the business internationally is my target, he explained. While the SteelEye subsidiary currently represents the vast majority of that international business, SIOS is looking at its opportunities to make use of its Linux engineers and support expertise outside Asia Pac.
As 10 Art-ni the company already had relationships with Red Hat and JBoss, as well as Black Duck Software. Gotsubo said the company is now looking at ways to boost its product portfolio based on open source software, with one target area being internal collaboration.
It [the SteelEye acquisition] is a pretty big investment for us, compared to the size of the business, Gotsubo said. LifeKeeper is our biggest internal R&D product. There are many small projects. In comparison to the revenue from LifeKeeper, their revenue is not really good enough, he added.
While the SteelEye name survived the initial re-branding of 10 Art-ni to SIOS, the subsidiary’s name will eventually be phased out as the new company looks to make a name for itself as a global provider of open source software and services.
10 Art-ni has a good history in Japan, but in order to grow globally we decided to change the name, Gotsubo explained, noting that the company is looking to emulate some significant players with its new brand. We are aiming to be like a Sony, he added.
That might be a long-term target, but given the relative immaturity of the open source services and systems integration market, the opportunities are there, especially given the relative lead Asia Pac and Europe has over the US in terms of open source adoption.
An example comes from the take-up for SteelEye’s LifeKeeper high availability software. According to SteelEye EMEA director, John Banfield, more than 90% of its business in central Europe is on Linux, with the rest on Windows, while in Japan the business is primarily Linux based. The UK, like the US, is much more 50/50.
SteelEye’s president and chief executive, Paul Adams, explained: Japan has really led the deployment in the Linux world. Europe has been leading the charge in terms of re-deploying business applications to Linux. In the US, new applications have been migrated to Linux, but these don’t have the same requirements for high availability.
Following the purchase of SteelEye, further acquisitions could also be in the works, although they will be opportunistic. It’s not an acquisition trail per se, said Adams. We’ll do mergers and acquisitions where it makes sense.
According to Gotsubo, growing the business is primarily about partnerships rather than acquisitions or new products. we are trying to further our partner relationships in order for us to grow, he said. That’s the main goal.
The SteelEye brand will could provide a springboard into Western customers for SIOS, and the company is also looking to expand on its LifeKeeper heritage. One area of interest is virtualization. As previously reported, in August LifeKeeper delivered high availability clustering for virtual machines.
According to Adams, this is a significant opportunity for the company, especially given the fact that customers are already trying and failing to achieve high availability for virtual environments. Most IT shops have deployed virtual environments or are evaluating virtual environments, so there’s a lot of activity in the market right now, he said.
Some people think you can build an HA environment with virtualization without added middleware. We’ve been trying to dispel the myth that virtualization delivers HA. It can be used as a tool to achieve those goals, but you need some added HA middleware, he explained. Customers have run themselves into problems and are now waking up to the fact, he added.
As well as its traditional high availability market, SIOS’s SteelEye subsidiary is also looking to expand its presence as a data replication provider, Adams added. It is out intention to be a major player in delivering data replication solutions, not just in terms of high availability, but in terms of backup and recovery, Adams said.
We’re building out our data replication to provide synchronous and asynchronous replication over LANs and WANs, for data to be available from more than two locations, and to be in sync, he added, noting that the company is lining up further announcements for the new year.
