Atempo, the long time leader in data protection, was a good surprise of the recent
IT Press Tour and it was the perfect opportunity to get an update on the current company as it evolved a lot for several years now.
It was an easy mission for
Atempo team as the company and products are pretty famous for a few decades now and lots of people know it already. So we needed to get some interesting angles.
Back to the root, Atempo was started as
Quadratec in 1991 by
Dominique Vinay and kept this name approximately 10 years, changing its name to Atempo during one of the famous Forum Stockage show in 2001.
For a decent period of time, Atempo was associated to
Time Navigator aka Tina and its well known time navigation, so the name, its GUI and its capabilities to generate synthetic full backup images from "independent" ones. In other words, Tina was able to present very simply a data environment at a given data acting like a Time Addressable Storage solution.
Later the company acquired
Storactive and
Synerway, more recently the assets of
Lima (always same kind of words finally...), not to forget the period of approximately 8 years under ASG leadership that was not a memorable moment for the team. Atempo got "evacuated" from ASG and finally landed in the Wooxo-Atempo group being absorbed by Kick Start Management in 2017, a business entity led by
Luc d'Urso and
Cyprien Roy and based in La Ciotat near Marseille in France. This new life means also a new logo with green and blue colors and new values centered around preserving and ensuring durable environment.
In the meantime, Atempo has extended its product line with
Atempo Digital Archive best know under the acronym of
ADA.
The company's leaders launched a new entity name NextIno, acting as an AI lab, and based in Orleans in France. This lab is led by
Bernard Peultier, a long time Atempo executives, data protection pioneer and father of ADA.
In term of products, we already mentioned Tina and ADA, we must also list
Lina (Live Navigator) for endpoint protection with near-CDP mode and
Backstone, a backup appliance line tailored for RoBo.
The last product iteration was
Miria who targets
Backup,
Migration,
Archiving and
Data Moving for large unstructured data environments. Miria is open to all NAS and file servers as sources, even some special flavors like IBM GPFS aka Spectrum Scale and soon Lustre, Panasas and WekaIO we hope, and support file and - on-premises and cloud - object storage devices in term of targets.
With 135 people working for the new Atempo and offices in France, UK, Germany, Italy, Belgium, USA, China, Korea and Singapore, the team is ready for new challenges and business expansions. The business model is
100% channel with a large network of VARs and VADs with specific alliances. The pricing model is a mix of perpetual license but also a new subscription/SaaS approach.
2020 should be interested to see with next iteration of all these products and the arrival on
NextIno AI contribution to makes them even more unique. We expect also to see a pure SaaS flavor of Tina or Miria.
HYCU, the emerging data protection player for hybrid cloud workload, reserved a surprise for The IT Press Tour attendees a few weeks ago as its team unveiled in exclusivity Protégé, its new data management product to solve the multi-cloud data protection challenges.
iXsystems and Asigra continue to partner and this time expand their agreement with the Asigra Cloud Backup v14 Plugin for FreeNAS. This software is free for FreeNAS up to 10 systems and 10 cloud accounts, perfect for SOHO and SMB customers. This is the community edition but an enterprise Asigra license is available for large environments and price is based on number f systems to protect.
Atempo, a reference in data protection, made a key decision with the evolution of Atempo Digital Archive known as ADA, a well established archiving product on the market, to become Miria, at least to serve a its roots.
This is pretty strange to pick and use a solution and completely hide the brand and the product from its technology provider. Scaleway even says that they developed their solution which is just wrong as they use OpenIO, a French object storage toy, invisible from the market. But it's probably not so good to rely and promote an unknown player. The reality is they built a first toy sorry product internally now replaced by an other toy. I wrote an other post in September 2018 when their service was in beta. Why they didn't pick Minio, the obvious S3 object storage, adopted worldwide? You can argue "but with Minio we'll do like other", sure but at least the product is respected, deployed and reliable and users trust the team and the product so finally you offer parity with others and you don't create a doubt...
The product has won the TechTarget SearchStorage Best Backup/DR Hardware product of the year for 2018, the finalist was Cohesity and third place was occupied by Unitrends.
