Aiming to server those who don't stand and wait ...

By ADAM GIFFORD

Wellington software company Maximum Availability has its eyes on 400,000 AS/400 sites worldwide as the market for its NoMax data replication engine.

The IBM AS/400 has been the reliable workhorse for tens of thousands of manufacturers, insurance companies, banks and other organisations for almost 20 years.

But Maximum Availability sales director Simon O'Sullivan said the advent of e-business was posing new challenges, as systems administrators found that the time to do back-ups was shrinking .

That means replication software, which allows the contents of a server to be mirrored on to another server in real time, becomes a necessity rather than an option.

"The AS/400 is incredibly reliable, but it does need regular system maintenance.

"It's good practice to bring it down once a week," Mr O'Sullivan said.

Existing replication products in the market from the likes of DataMirror in Canada and Vision Solutions and Lakeview Technology in the US are expensive.

"If you add up all the replication products, they have fewer than 10,000 sites and those are all at the high end. We thought, what about the rest."

Those products are priced according to the size of the processor in the Machine. NoMax is charged by application stream, meaning sites can do entry-level data replication for relatively little investment, or can transfer data from large production servers to smaller back-up or web servers without the processor cost.

That is what happened at Maximum Availability's first customer, insurance firm Jacques Martin, which wanted to pull data off its main server to put on a web server.

"All the other products we looked at to make the data available 24 by 7 were very expensive. Maximum Availability's NoMax functioned from day one for us," said Jacques Martin systems development manager Drew Sommerville.

The five staff and founders of Maximum Availability came out of IBM in April last year, after working on its ICMS billing software. They invested about $50,000 in a small AS/400, and set to work building the software.

The main programmer, American Jamie Tarbell, came to New Zealand 10 years ago to write the replication module available as part of ICMS.

While IBM continues to support the replication module in ICMS, it has not enhanced it for four years, meaning many ICMS sites are now looking for software which takes advantage of new features in the operating system of the new iSeries AS/400s, such as remote journaling.

Mr O'Sullivan said Pegasus Computers, which sold Maximum Availability its AS/400, put the company on to Jacques Martin, who expressed interest in NoMax.

A working version was installed on its server by August.

Pegasus, which has been appointed New Zealand reseller, also put the company on to the Lotteries Commission, which uses NoMax to back up financial data between its Wellington and Auckland sites, and Westpac, which uses it to back up a server used for an insurance product.

"We installed it at Westpac in a day," Mr O'Sullivan said. For now Maximum Availability is handling export prospects direct, targeting ICMS sites, but is also talking to independent software vendors who make packages for the AS/400.

He said it was on the verge of its first international sale. "If we hook one big international customer, we will break even."


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