Spotlight

Business continuity with Panaces

Taking the product route in the storage space in India is challenging. Vinutha V says that Sanovi Technologies is set to target the top Fortune 1000 companies with its flagship product, Panaces.

In 2000, a team of four specialists—Srinivas Pothapragada, Lakshman Narayanaswamy, Raja Vonna and Sekhar Pulamarasetti—decided to develop storage solutions. With a background in data management, application continuity and data protection, they founded Sanrise in California, USA. Funded by a venture

capital firm from the Bay Area, the company began serving some 600 customers principally in North America, Europe and Asia. Later, when EMC was looking to expand its storage services, Sanrise’s IP (Intellectual Property) was sold to it while the customers went to Cable & Wireless.

A whole new product

The founders of Sanrise were aware of the potential in the storage space. Several hardware vendors and customers associated with them had storage requirements in the areas of data protection and application continuity. Hence, in 2002, the same team set up Sanovi Technologies to specialise in Disaster Recovery (DR) and Business Continuity (BC) solutions.

“In India, bringing a product idea in storage space to fruition is not easy as it requires a different set of skills and value-adds. But we were aiming at competing in wider areas within storage, hence we felt that taking the product route was the best option,” says Narayanaswamy, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Sanovi Inc.

The company started with an offering called Enterprise Continuity Lifecycle Management that was targeted at financial institutions to develop effective BC programmes. HDFC Bank, which was its first customer, handed over its entire DR and backup work to the company.

Soon it launched its first flagship product, Panaces, an enterprise continuity manager. The product was designed and built around the principles of predictable BC. It not only tackled problem points of conventional BC, but laid the foundation for an efficient and cost-effective approach to true continuity. It features centralised remote management and integrates with enterprise management software. It also supports dependent relationships between islands of applications and comprehensive reporting of outages, variations and responses.

Traditionally, switching the application from failover to fallback is done manually. Panaces offers automated, pre-tested actions, and supports multi-vendor replication technology. It tightly integrates replication states with an application’s data view.

Sanovi’s DR services are built around Panaces. “There was a lot of complexity and inability to guarantee that a DR solution would work for enterprises, and our flagship product just met our customers’ requirements,” explains Narayanaswamy. Business continuity as offered by the company is an extended service of its DR offering. DR is an older term that is used for recovery of IT systems which involves technological solutions. It means a reactive approach to managing recovery. BC has a broader scope than DR. It suggests a proactive approach in keeping the business available.

BC beyond DR

Everyday events such as software and hardware crashes or errors, patch upgrades, configuration changes, network problems and power failures cause most business outages. In such cases, organisations should be capable of resuming their business without any downtime. DR comes as a boon to recover lost data, yet it is important to take business downtime into consideration. To keep an organisation running, BC is of paramount importance. “It is a process and not a technology solution. It is not a one-time effort. A plan that will work for you is the one that involves the right people, has processes in place, and is backed by IT and infrastructure support to keep the business going,” informs Narayanaswamy. BC also includes external interfaces comprising logistics and training.

Although BC is a must across verticals, it’s catching up in manufacturing, finance, telecom and government. It is generating a lot of interest in mature organisations in these verticals. Regulatory compliance and customer expectations are prompting organisations to go in for BC. In BFSI, the RBI’s regulation on DR for RTGS (Real Time Gross Settlement) is driving the trend. In manufacturing, it’s mapping into ERP. The growing importance of back-office applications and customer service is making IT applications’ mission critical in the telecom sector. “The lack of awareness at the management level in the enterprise poses a hurdle for further growth in the BC space. However, we have been countering this challenge by educating customers through our channel partners. Over the last three years, Sanovi has over 25 clients such as the UTI Bank, Corporation Bank, HDFC, L&T and STPI, Bangalore,” says Narayanaswamy.

"Lack of awareness at the management level in the enterprise poses a hurdle for further growth in the business continuity space" - L Narayanaswamy Co-founder & CTO, Sanovi	"We have completed a few pilots for business continuity in the US. Next year we expect to finalise a few customers over there" - K Aravazhi Vice-president, Sales Sanovi

Fortune 1000

In April 2005, Sanovi kicked off its Centre for Business Continuity Excellence in Bangalore to develop and test BC and DR solutions for customers worldwide. Also, the company will invest $10 million in the next three years to expand its engineering centre and sales and support operations in India. Currently, it says it has met only 70 percent of storage market requirements. In future, it intends to support platforms such as IBM Mainframe, Unix and NetWare. So far the company has filed two patents related to Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO). It aims at filing patents in the areas of recovery mechanisms and continuity.

Sanovi has its geographical reach in India, the Middle-East and US. “We [now] intend to focus on the APAC region. In the US market, we have completed a few pilots for BC. In the second quarter of 2006 we expect to finalise a few customers in the US,” says K Aravazhi, the company’s Vice-president, Sales. Sanovi markets Panaces through direct-selling for the greater part. However, it has signed up IBM, Hitachi, Veritas and EMC as its partners.

The company declined to divulge its current revenue, but it has set a target of $25 million in three years. Sanovi says it can achieve its target by aiming at Fortune 1000 companies and reaching out to mid-sized customers through its channel partners.

In the next four months, Sanovi is expecting to raise a second round of funding which will be spent on its expansion.

vinutha@expresscomputeronline.com