Catalogic, which makes ‘in place’ copy data management software, had strong results at last week’s Pure Accelerate event.
Catalogic’s session at Pure Accelerate
Woodcliff Lake N.J.-based Catalogic Software made a strong pitch at last week’s Pure Accelerate event to both Pure Storage’s customers and their channel partners, focusing on the value-add they can offer with their software-defined copy data management [CDM] capabilities.
Catalogic was created in October 2013 as a spinoff from Syncsort, which had decided to focus on its core data integration business. Catalogic’s flagship ECX platform provides a management layer to administer all the copy functions of storage arrays — snapshots, replication and clones – in an easy to use, automated and scalable way.
“Syncsort had created some products that weren’t mainframe-focused and they spun them out,” said Bill Simpson, Catalogic’s Vice President of Channel Sales. “At first, our focus was on NetApp. We did both data protection and file analytics. We catalogued it all and analyzed it, which NetApp couldn’t do. We have continued to expand our platforms, and now support Pure Storage, IBM and Unity from Dell EMC as well.”
Simpson said the plan is to gradually do integrations for additional arrays.
“We have about ten platforms that we have lined up on the roadmap by priority, and plan to add about one a quarter,” he said.
Simpson emphasized that Catalogic’s “in place” CDM provides a differentiation for them against competitors like Actifio and Cohesity.
“Our competitors move data into a box, their own third party appliance,” Simpson said. “We don’t migrate data off the array and move it to a third party appliance. We do it in place, with a piece of software on the array.” Catalogic emphasizes that that makes them superior in dev/test environments, where everything will be developed on the same platform that will be used for production.
Catalogic recently upgraded the ECX platform in its 2.6 release, which was primarily about expansion of application support. It was added for: SAP HANA on Linux, on Intel based x86 and IBM Power Systems; for InterSystems Caché database and Epic Electronic Health Record software on Linux and AIX, on IBM Power Systems; and for SQL Server 2012, 2014 and 2016 on physical servers.
“Epic in health care is now a big interest to us now, particularly because it is vertical,” Simpson said. “Those types of applications we spend more time on, because the challenge is getting an app-consistent snapshot you can serve up to developers. Similarly, to work with Oracle, if you don’t deliver into RMAN, Oracle admins will reject it, so integration into RMAN was critical for us.”
Catalogic sells through a 100 per cent channel model.
“We will always work through a partner, and we work with partners who bring us into their opportunities,” Simpson said. “Being a younger company, it’s incumbent on us to drive opportunities ourselves, so we market to end users all the time in order to get traction. But we always ask them what partner they work with as we get traction with them.”
Simpson said that Pure partners are an important strategic asset for Catalogic because ECX adds a lot of value to Pure.
“We work closely with people reselling Pure arrays,” he stated. “Our software allows Pure to compete much more effectively against companies like NetApp and EMC who have a much stronger software stack within their products.”
Simpson said that partners also sell Catalogic as a high-margin product independent of the array sale, taking it back to their base, selling it into other platforms, and becoming more strategic to their customer.
“Partners also use us as a wedge product,” he said. “If a customer bought a Pure array from a competitor, they can still register them with Catalogic and use it as a door opener, where it’s a value-add piece and not part of a big storage sale.”
Simpson said they were exceptionally pleased with the partner response at Pure Accelerate, where they held a well-attended session on “Oracle and SQL Server Aware Snapshot and Replication Copy Automation for Pure Storage, ” and were a sponsor of the Pure Storage Global Partner Forum Executive Networking Reception.
“The session at the Global Partner Forum was great, because there were only five vendors and the Pure team, and only partners were there,” Simpson said. “We were able to network with everybody. We also got a lot of bangs for our buck. With the presentation, the rooms were sized right, and the sessions were preannounced well, and the event was way out on the pier, where there was nowhere else to go.”
