Astrum Catches 11 Sweet Ones

Storage resource management (SRM) software developer Astrum Software Corp. has landed 11 new customers in its fourth quarter, a significant endorsement given the grim state of the economy.

The company began the quarter with the announcement of its active SRM product, Astrum 1.5, a storage software application that provides active policy-based management of data storage resources and applications (see Astrum Gets Active).

Moreover, according to Astrum, over 90 percent of its existing customer base upgraded to version 1.5 of the company's software in the fourth quarter, and nearly a quarter of the existing customers purchased additional licenses, the company says. Astrum declined to say how many customers it has total.

Robert Infantino, founder and executive VP of business development at Astrum, says the biggest driver for its software is resource consolidation.

"Our customers are consolidating from over a thousand or so servers into the hundreds, and as they implement centralized storage they are using our software to categorize data," he says. Astrum's product automates the process by which data is migrated to the new architecture. For example, according to policies set by the administrator, the software can detect which data is a year old, which is non-business related, or which should be archived to tape, and move it accordingly. [Ed. note: While the admin goes off and reads the newspaper.]The other major driver for Astrum's sales has been business continuity initiatives, Infantino says. "Our software can identify where the growth is occurring in a particular application so that admins do not have to keep reconfiguring their SANs in order to keep them running." Astrum's software works with Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) Exchange and SQL Server, and Oracle Corp.'s (Nasdaq: ORCL) database software.

Customers now using Astrum's software include:

[Ed. note: Confusingly, these are not actually Astrum's new customers. Some of those have not yet been named.]

Online backup service provider Amerivault uses the software to manage 30 terabytes of storage. "We need to be able to track the growth of our customers' storage environments, as we must grow in conjunction with them, as well as monitor our storage resources for when we hit certain threshold levels," says Kevin Harris, Amerivault's CTO.

Astrum, which employs about 30 people, has one OEM deal with Overland Storage Inc. (Nasdaq: OVRL) for its software and is actively seeking other reseller and OEM partners. It closed its last round of $5.3 million in funding from JMI Equity Fund LP in March 2001. It's worth noting that JMI is run by John Moores, founder of BMC Software Inc. (see Overland Takes Software Route).While its renewed vigor is commendable, Astrum still faces considerable competition from the large framework management software companies, like Computer Associates International Inc. (CA) (NYSE: CA) and BMC, which are stepping up their efforts in storage management.

Other public companies on the lookout for SRM action include Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) (HighGround), EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) (Compaq), McData Corp. (Nasdaq: MCDTA) (with SANavigator), and Veritas Software Corp. (Nasdaq: VRTS) (see CA Spans Into SANs and BMC OEMs From Invio).

Then there's a horde of other startups, besides Astrum, chasing this market. These include Arkivio Inc., MonoSphere Inc., Netreon, PowerQuest, Storability Inc., and TeraCloud Corp. To this already-hefty list, you can add AppIQ Corp., CreekPath Systems Inc., InterSAN Inc., Invio Software Inc., and TrueSAN Networks Inc., each of which offer some SRM functionality within broader storage management platforms.

It's not hard to see why the analysts are predicting mass consolidation in this sector, this year. In fact, it's already underway: EMC acquired Prisa Networks and IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) acquired TrelliSoft in the latter half of 2002 (see EMC to Acquire Prisa, Finally and IBM Snaps Up TrelliSoft