Artisan Infrastucture’s broadening beyond its original wholesale infrastructure-as-a-service necessitated a new name change, particularly with more new offerings on the roadmap.
Chris Wiser, MSP Channel Chief at Artisan Infrastructure
HOLLYWOOD FLA — Austin TX-based Artisan Infrastructure has taken a leaf from companies past and renamed itself after one of its products. The company is now called Neverfail, a brand the company has owned since it acquired Neverfail almost exactly two years ago. Neverfail also announced that it has moved into the Workspace-as-a-Service (WaaS) market, with the acquisition of Vertiscale. The Vertiscale software has now been rebranded Neverfail Workspaces. Neverfail is attending the CompTIA ChannelCon event here in its first public appearance with its new brand.
Artisan Infrastructure has been a long time supplier of wholesale cloud infrastructure-as-a-service sold through channel partners. More recently however, they have supplemented that core offering with the Neverfail business continuity and Hybristor solutions. Now with this addition of the Vertiscale WaaS offerings, the company believed a new brand was needed.
“We now have multiple products in our suite that stray away from Infrastructure-only,” said Chris Wiser, MSP Channel Chief at Artisan Infrastructure. “In addition to the Neverfail products, we have Vertiscale, and a couple more products getting ready to launch.”
“One of the key things the company has done is diversified beyond Infrastructure, and so it needed a brand that moved beyond that,” added Jon Senger, who was the CTO and Cofounder of Vertiscale, and who now moves over to Neverfail as its Chief Architect. “The company is repositioning with new products into more of a one-stop shop. It’s still very much a wholesale model, but is more encompassing. It also extends the market beyond service providers and into the enterprise.
Wiser also admitted that in addition to Artisan Infrastructure brand now being somewhat obsolete, it is also much less catchier than Neverfail.
“Neverfail is a good solid brand name, and also has the advantage of being far shorter,” he said. “One of the things we have been struggling with is people not spelling Artisan Infrastructure right. It seems kind of petty, but it was an issue.”
The new WaaS offering from Vertiscale is a pure software play, as opposed to being combined with hardware and services. It thus fits into that part of the market where it competes against companies like Citrix and VMware.
“Vertiscale was founded in 2015, after we looked at the market and noticed there wasn’t a solution for service providers that wanted to offer BYOD, and there was a gap in HIPAA compliance,” Senger said. “Our initial offering was related to this compliance, and was targeted at health care end-customers through the channel. We got a great response. HIPAA compliance is still evolving, and being able to track users, who did what, when and where is not something that others can do out of the box.”
Jon Senger, Neverfail’s Chief Architect
Senger said their WaaS offering is also differentiated by its high level of automation, and by its advanced security, particularly its encryption and its hybrid Active Directory integration.
“We support security in new or existing environments,” he said. “A lot of customers have existing Active Directory, and we can plug into that existing environment, instead of requiring standing up a unique environment for them. That’s a real differentiator that helped us take off quite quickly. In addition, you have to focus on encryption in security and we do in several ways. All the traffic is encrypted, and with different algorithms than the portal. We also developed a virtual appliance that can be deployed in any environment, with all encryption keys stored and managed within the cloud.”
Wiser, a former MSP, said some of these features are particularly valuable in that market.
“A couple of these pieces are massively impactful for MSPs – the encryption piece, and the hybrid Active Directory integration. They make things far easier.”
Senger also pointed out that the automation from the WaaS offering can be applied more broadly throughout the Neverfail portfolio.
“The cool part about what Vertiscale brings to the Neverfail brand goes just being the WaaS becoming a core part of the stable of software Neverfail can offer. The automation technology acquired will also help with the automation of other products. There’s complexity in that which Vertiscale solved, which benefits the whole product portfolio quite extensively.”
Wiser said Neverfail partners can expect to see other new products in one to two quarters. Longer term, over the next 12 to 24 months, Senger said that a new stable of workspace products will also appear.
