XOSoft Readies Replication

You have to give style points to a software company named after a cognac. The question is whether XOsoft can live up to its name. If it were a cognac, the Burlington, Mass.-based company would still be a few years away from XO status. [Ed. note: XO stands for Extra Old, which means cognac aged at least 6.5 years. Cheers!]

XOSoft, founded in 1999 as a document delivery company and repositioned in August 2001, hopes its new WANSync High Availability (HA) disaster recovery platform will give it the legs to make XO status. Its value proposition is a feature called application-aware failover to remote sites. WANSync HA is designed to detect when a database or application server fails and automatically bring up a synchronized replica without manual intervention.

The automatic replication differentiates XOSoft from most of its competitors, including Legato Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: LGTO), Veritas Software Corp. (Nasdaq: VRTS), and other suppliers that provide data replication.

WANSync HA supports Oracle and Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server databases, and costs $6,000 per server for the database version. The version for file servers costs $4,500 per server.

Not earthshattering, but at least one analyst thinks automatic replication may help impress the right channels. It’s an evolutionary rather than revolutionary path,” says analyst David Hill of Aberdeen Group Inc. “But their offering meets a need in the marketplace, and it’s something not many of their competitors have... Their problem is simply getting their name in front of the right people at the right time." That means impressing would-be partners, including VARs and OEMs.XOSoft will need to push its product hard, given the tough competition it faces. To help widen that indirect channel, it set up a partnership program in September (see XOsoft Turns Back Time).

XOSoft CEO Leonid Shtilman insists things were going well for his company before today’s release of WanySYNC HA. “But we were not able to provide a solution for high availability until now,” Shtilman says. He claims the previous version of the product, a manual replication package released last June, helped XOSoft pick up 80 new customers in the last year, bringing its total to 90 worldwide (see XOsoft Launches Partner Program).

XOSoft is certainly better off than it was during its first two years when it burned through $20 million and failed to come up with a content delivery product. XOSoft then changed its focus and closed additional funding with JK&B Capital (Nasdaq: LGTO)as lead investor. How much was garnered, Shtilman schtil isn't saying. “We’re quite stable now,” he maintains.

— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch