The Maynard, Massachusetts-based fault-tolerant server vendor added Linux to its Intel Corp processor ftServer line in March 2004, but the Red Hat Inc Linux-based T-Series machines are focused specifically on the telecommunications market.
For the Linux offering we picked telco and developed NEBS technology for that, said Stratus’s president and CEO David Laurello. Meanwhile, the company’s Windows-based ftServer W Series line is designed for more general-purpose fault-tolerant environments but that is about to change. Next year we’ll be coming out with an enterprise-wide Linux product line, said Laurello. We think Linux is definitely real, and there is demand in the marketplace to have competing operating systems.
In particular, Linux has been successful in the financial services market, said Laurello, one of Stratus’s core markets for fault-tolerant servers over its 25-year history. It’s more with financial services companies that we really see the play, he said.
The general-purpose Linux-based ftServer line is also being delivered in response to growing customer demand, according to Laurello, who said customers feel more in control of a Linux offering in terms of deploying new releases and support offerings. That’s why we see them adopting it, he said.
A general-purpose Linux server line will give Stratus the opportunity to give customers a choice for their mission-critical applications, and it is increasingly becoming less important to the company what technology they are running, according to Laurello.
At the solution level, you kind of hope they don’t care too much, he said, of Stratus’s aim to increase its position as a provider of availability solutions, rather than simply high-availability hardware. More and more applications have the need to be continuously available, but the definition of availability includes applications, the environment, changes to the environment, and disaster recovery.
That is why the company is building up its solutions offerings to deliver availability assessments to identify holes in, for example, a customer’s change and configuration management processes.
We’re looking at bringing in solution services, or professional services, levels of capability, Laurello said. We do need to bring in the human capital around delivering services, and will be partnering until we do.
The solutions approach, combined with lower-cost ftServer hardware compared to Stratus’s legacy offerings, has already paid off in the pharmaceutical manufacturing space, according to Laurello.
The company boasts that it can now count 14 or 15 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies as its customers. We weren’t in any with our legacy systems, Laurello admitted. Nine months ago we were selling into pharmaceuticals but it was via partners and our visibility was extremely poor. We took a focused approach to get in front of CIOs and focus on their pain points.
