Kiwi data safety net has global appeal

Simon O'Sullivan. Picture / Reuters

The biggest challenge faced by Auckland-based disaster recovery specialist Maximum Availability is being in New Zealand.

When it comes to winning rugby World Cup bids in Ireland and selling gourmet kumara to England or cheese to China, being a New Zealander help.

But selling data recovery software supported from Auckland to hard-nosed United States businessmen in Arkansas is a different kettle of fish, says Maximum Availability director Simon O'Sullivan.

"You can imagine they are going to say: 'Hang on, I'm going to trust all my disaster recovery to you and you guys are in New Zealand? You better prove to me you can support it'."

It's a sales task made harder by the fact that Maximum Availability's biggest competitors are based in North America.

"We're winning through that," O'Sullivan says. "We can now quote happy customers. You rise above it with a track record."

The company, co-founded by ex-IBM employee O'Sullivan, specialises in data recovery for the roughly 450,000 IBM iSeries servers used worldwide.

Maximum Availability has about 130 customers in 30 countries. With its three biggest competitors accounting for about 10,000 customers between them, he says the future "is all about market penetration".

Japan is a good example, he says. There, fewer than 200 out of 35,000 iSeries servers use real-time back-up.

The company, established in 2000, has 20 staff in offices in Auckland, Wellington, Tokyo, the United States and London. It also has 50 agents, a tactic that has proved successful in Germany, where laws regarding data retention are pushing companies from tape-based systems to real-time products.

Although the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina have raised the awareness of disaster recovery, most companies are "back in the dark ages" using tape-based systems, O'Sullivan says.

If tapes are only backed up daily then companies run the risk of up to 24-hours of "orphan data".

Rebuilding servers can mean it can be days before the data can be replicated, and then only to the point of disaster.

"Not only have you had a three or four-day outage, you're behind the eight ball anyway".

Although O'Sullivan is happy to sell to any iSeries user, affordability and ease of use are features the company uses to target its "sweet spot" of small to medium-sized businesses.

Ten years ago a real-time system would have cost more than US$200,000 ($288,000) and been the preserve of large companies. Maximum Availability's products now cost about US$25,000 to install.

He says that with back-up servers put in remote locations for safety reasons, the falling cost of bandwidth is spurring the real-time option.

Who: Co-founder Simon O'Sullivan.

Where: Headquartered in Auckland; overseas offices.

What: Disaster recovery of data.

Why: "There's a large part of the market that is back in the dark ages."