Aptare, Insights for IT environments

Aptare (www.aptare.com), leader in IT monitoring and reporting, was a good surprise during the recent IT Press Tour. We have the chance to visit and meet a player not so visible on the market but with a very comprehensive solution for managing IT environments.

Founded in 1993 by Rick Clark, still CEO and President, the company, based in Campbell in California, was founded on private funds and finally never raised any venture money. Profitable, the company has controlled its destiny since the beginning and today manages several exabytes of data for over 1000 clients on the planet.

Rick Clark, CEO, illustrating the value of One Central Console

Aptare StorageConsole, now in version 10, can control, manage and monitor via one console various IT environments - on-premise or cloud -, server- or vm-based operations, for many operating systems, file systems, volumes managers, storage and network device and data protection tools such backup or replication. All these capabilities makes Aptare pretty unique on the market with no real competitor globally even if for some portion of the function, some solutions try to compete. Centrally managed via a very comprehensive console, the philosophy of the product relies on an agentless approach to collect all data in a central repository based on Oracle DB.

In fact, Aptare made several tentative with other DB engines but never found the right one able to storage huge amount of data, tables and records and be able to be significantly fast. It was a decision made several years as we understand that the market has made great progress int hat direction with very-fast DB, NoSQL or not, distributed...

In term of use cases, the product excels in capacity planning and monitoring, risk mitigation, compliance control and participate to the reduction of costs wherever data resides, on-premise or in the cloud. The company has an important installed base in finance, usually good candidate for heterogeneity, where the product is excellent. The second key market segment is the service/SaaS providers where mixed generation, model and brands are very frequent as well. Aptare have chosen a pure indirect model to maximize the effort and also developed some oem relationships like the one with Hitachi. With the latter, StorageConsole is named Hitachi Storage Viewer.

You can find the entire presentation used during the event to go beyond this post. IT was a great session with plenty of information and good interaction.