Analysis

posted on 03 April 2008 12:36

In the field of data protection and archiving Atempo is a player that is expanding out of its European base and growing both its geographic and its application coverage. B&F talked to Karim Toubba, VP of marketing for Atempo, about the company and its strategy.

Atempo is a broadly-focused software company offering a data protection, archiving, eDiscovery and compliance portfolio. The most well-known product is Time Navigator which offers continuous data protection (CDP). The company is privately-owned with offices in Paris, Moscow, and Pune in India, and 275 employees overall. There are more than 3,000 customers worldwide, with about 1,800 in Europe, and in excess of 60 customers, including the Met Office and EasyNet, in the UK.

The products are 'low touch', with users not seeing the Atempo Time Navigator application unless they need to retrieve a file. The technology is virtually admin-free.

Strategy

Atempo's strategy is to widen the capabilities of its CDP technology and repository of data. It has done this by capturing data on notebook computers and in remote offices, extending the data types supported, and adding eDiscovery and compliance capabilities.

It's worth doing this because the number of digital assets owned by organisations is rapidly increasing, witness the IDC data explosion concept. Toubba says that the main areas driving digital archiving are, in order, e-mail, file storage , database, and mainframes. Another positive influence on the CDP aspect of this is the shrinking backup window.

How has Atempo executed against this strategy?

In March 2006 it bought StorActive, then the last independent PC and notebook continuous data protection (CDP) vendor. It gave Atempo a broader storage story, one with real-time CDP running from the network edge to the core.

The company went through a funding round in September 2007 which brought in $22 million. The money is being used for R&D, for acquisitions, and for growing its regional market capabilities.

In February Atempo bought Lighthouse Technologies and its e-mail archiving technology.

It is working to increase its US presence and will continue with its channel-sales-focused model. Only 28 percent of its revenue comes from direct sales.

Asked about the possibility of an IPO Toubba said: "We're growing at a very aggressive clip year over year. Based on what we do over the next 12 - 18 months we'll see. We don't rule out an IPO."

ADA development

Version two of ADA - Atempo Digital Archive - will be made available in mid-May. With it the intention is for Atempo to provide unified protection of an organisation's digital assets, including settable policies for items such as file retention periods.

ADA v2 has had compliance and eDiscovery technologies added to it. The product covers both email and instant messaging (IM) with its ADAM module (Atempo Digital Archive for Messaging). This can quarantine e-mail and IM exchanges where needed.

How does Atempo compare to Autonomy Zantaz? Toubba said: "Autonomy/Zantaz provides search, eDiscovery and compliance but not the general repository building."

The Atempo repository can reside on any suitable storage with Toubba saying: "You would be hard-pressed to find a hardware vendor Atempo doesn't work with."

Atempo has an API opening into ADA so that its users can inter-operate with other products such as the Autonomy/Zantaz ones or Google Search.

Software as a service

Would Atempo offer its software as a service (SaaS)? Toubba said: "We're a SaaS-enabler. We do not plan on offering a SaaS service directly. It requires a tremendous resource investment in marketing and awareness. We believe it will be an SME interest, the low end of the market. It makes more sense for us to enable providers to offer SaaS."

He discussed Carbonite, offering an annual unlimited backup capability for $49.99, and Mozy, with its $12.95 plus a few cents/GB pricing model. There must be, Toubba thinks: "razor-thin margins. There will be severe pricing pressure."

"I believe there will be regional players. We want to be enablers of regional players, not the BTs of this world. The regional players will have very strong (local) relationships where BT will never play."

The archive world

There are many players in the archival storage world. Some focus specifically on e-mail archiving. Others aim to suck inactive data off online storage and provide a more cost-effective storage repository for it. Sometimes this is a relatively stand-alone archive whilst others position it as part of an integrated information lifecycle management offering.

Virtually all players are offering compliance facilities together with search and eDiscovery. There is no one single archive application any more. It is a multi-faceted area. The task Atempo has given itself is to build upon its data-generating CDP technology and have the resulting repository become a foundation on which eDiscovery, search and compliance functions, and possibly others, are layered.

Archive repositories surely have to become general purpose. Separate archive islands are a pain to provision and manage. The trick for suppliers is to have a strong product with strong capabilities in all the boxes that archive buyers will want ticked. With Atempo it looks as if buyers can tick a large number of archive boxes. That being the case Atempo has an interesting prospect in front of it.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}