AvePoint Highlights Q211
- Microsoft Sharepoint collaboration software is being widely adopted, but lacks infrastructure management
- AvePoint software adds data protection, centralised administration and helps to manage permissions.
- Can save costs be externalising data from SQL into lower tier storage
- Has a customer-centric GEAR management approach
- Offers ‘follow the sun’ support
- Is moving from 100% direct to a 50/50 direct/indirect distribution model
- Has to work at Microsoft speed for Cloud services deployment – slow
- Has the potential to turn its Sharepoint specialisation into more general purpose tools
- Microsoft’s MSIT is itself a reference customer
We recently spent time talking to AvePoint’s Chris Foreman (SVP Sales and Marketing), Nathan Trenzinger (VP North America & EMEA Alliances) and Sarju Raja, VP EMEA about AvePoint’s business.
This is a company offering products tied almost exclusively to Microsoft SharePoint, whose revenues are included in its Business Division (see Figure 1). AvePoint adds value through providing infrastructure management solutions such as migration tools, storage optimisation and back-up and disaster recovery processes to this widely used, but difficult-to-manage collaboration application. AvePoint is based in Jersey City, New Jersey and has 17 offices around the world. It has been in the UK for 4 years, starting out in Stockley Park (where many vendors including Unisys and Apple have also had offices), before moving recently to central London. It also has offices in Munich and Paris. It was founded 10 years ago and has 800 employees, 500 of whom are in software development roles.
Why SharePoint Needs Enhancing
Companies with Microsoft Enterprise licenses get SharePoint for free and it’s used by teams for sharing data, ideas and creating tasks within workgroups. Its wide use is based on the similarity of the interface with Microsoft Office and it has a widening role in workflow, search and document management. AvePoint is a fan, citing it as an important tool for collaboration, especially in the social space. However it can be unpredictable and is lacking in infrastructure and data management areas. Data associated with SharePoint tends to grow dramatically, whether inorganically as it’s brought in from legacy applications such as IBM’s Lotus Notes Live Link or organically from its popularity.
AvePoint’s products improve data protection, add centralised administration and help to manage permissions. It can also externalise data from SQL into lower tier storage. It also allows users to convert SharePoint attachments into centralised data accessible via email links, saving disk space through avoiding the proliferation of files.
AvePoint’s Customer Centric ‘Follow The Sun Support’
Despite being only a medium-sized company AvePoint’s network of offices allows it to provide its customers with 24 x 7 support, which it claims is unique among its competitors. Its presence in Japan, Singapore, South Africa, EMEA and North America allows it to provide ‘follow the sun’ support. Its customer focus is also attested by its Global Executive Account Response (GEAR) team, a group made up of its most senior executives. It meets every week to discuss and addresses specific issues and challenges from its customers – it had been involved with a particular Aerospace customer on the day before our discussions for instance.
Microsoft Technology Center Is Itself An AvePoint Reference Customer
AvePoint is a Depth Managed Microsoft Gold Certified Portals and Collaboration Partner and Gold Certified ISV Partner. Along with a hosting and services partner it helped migrate Microsoft Technology Center’s SharePoint 2007 portal to Microsoft’s Internal IT (MSIT), which includes SharePoint 2010, including 12k sites and 200 custom links. In the process it claims to have reduced the time to implementation by 2 months. While Microsoft is scrupulous in avoiding appearing to favour one partner over another, it is significant that it agreed to become an AvePoint reference customer. The implied endorsement is underlined by a video interview with Microsoft’s Chuck McCann, which enhances its image with AvePoint’s customers and its own partner channel.
Its reference customers also include the West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service for backup and recovery, TMF in Holland for backup and Anglo American for geographic data replication across three remote sites connected, where via low bandwidth communications restricted the use of a centralised implementation.
While improving management is an important function, buying extra software is an extra cost for the customer. However AvePoint claims it can reduce costs, citing an unnamed customer in the financial sector, whose SharePoint data had grown to 5PBs over a five-year period. It calculated its data storage costs as follows:
- Tier 1 – $4/GB/month
- Tier 2 – $1.80/GB/month
- Tier 3 – $0.40/GB/month
Once the internal project received the buy-in of the user departments, it managed to externalise 90% of the data, moving away from SharePoint’s usual Tier 1 storage and reducing its costs massively as a consequence.
AvePoint’s Go To Market Approach
AvePoint’s products are used by internal IT teams responsible for SharePoint, although it also targets IT directors, who tend to be interested in cost savings and application availability and C-Level executives in general about the issues driving adoption.
In the past its partner network was merely a fulfilment channel for its direct sales force, but is now becoming more strategic – especially as SharePoint grows in importance. It maps its go-to-market approach onto Microsoft’s Global Alliance and has SIs, VARs, consulting and hosting companies helping to expand its sales. In addition it uses distributors in specific countries such as Israel. It has been investing in joint business planning, proposal generation and training in marketing and teamwork with its partners in the recent past. In future Nathan believes that sales will move from 100% direct to a 50/50 direct/indirect balance.
AvePoint Locks Step With SharePoint
I asked the team whether it wasn’t important to develop for other platforms. Chris replied that although the company is weary of ‘putting all of its eggs in one basket’, the current ‘astounding’ adoption of SharePoint and AvePoint’s strong position in providing essential enhancements to make it ‘enterprise ready’ make this unnecessary at present. It sees the business flowing one way as governments and large organisations are throwing away older products in favour of Microsoft’s.
It does add backup and disaster facilities to salesforce.com, having commercialised the software it had developed for its own use as a customer: however even here the replication is into SharePoint.
In the Cloud Computing area AvePoint is also running at Microsoft speed. It believes that many customers will want to test the water with products such as Office 365, but it sees that end-users are still keen to maintain on-premise SharePoint environments as well. It is interesting that MSIT is a very similar system to Office 365, so we believe that it retains more than a latent capability of adding value to SharePoint if and when Microsoft decides to push it as a Cloud service in future. In addition it currently provides added services to Rackspace’s.
Avepoint’s OEM business includes IBM (badged as Tivoli for Sharepoint) and NetApp (SnapManager for Microsoft Sharepoint). It is part of the US government’s GSA purchasing scheme and OEMs Trend Micro anti virus products Sharepoint (exclusive to Japan).
Some Conclusions – A Strong Business For Now, But AvePoint Will Need To Diversify
When we’ve spoken with customers undergoing virtualisation projects before many mention the difficulty of working with Microsoft components such as Active Directory and pst files. Many have left SharePoint integration for future integration – so it’s good to see a company providing guidance and tools.
For once this was not an interview primarily about Cloud Computing or virtualisation, but about an important vendor almost exclusively tied to another’s product. If you’ve got to live under an umbrella, Microsoft’s is probably as good as any other, although we’re somewhat worried about its over-dependence. There are examples of others vendors which suffered badly in the past, whether Convergent Technologies for having too few OEM partners, or both ICL and Digital, which we would argue suffered for associating themselves too closely with NT. There are also a few examples of companies that have loosened the ties – Citrix is probably the most notable.
To be purely speculative – if AvePoint isn’t picky about its independence we can think of a number of systems vendors which could extend the reach of its expertise to a wider group of customers. If Microsoft enters on an acquisition spree we can think of few more valuable purchases.
We believe that its specialisation in SharePoint-specific offerings are potentially of great value if turned into more general purpose tools – especially if they can be added to Cloud services, where there are many unanswered questions at present. At the moment it is probably missing a number of revenue opportunities by having to run at Microsoft’s pace, although its products are being deployed in private and hybrid Cloud environments of course.
For users struggling with SharePoint, whether because it is hard to manage, too costly or unstable it clearly has a good story to tell.
Are you an AvePoint user? What are your experiences? As always, please let us know by commenting on this post.