History 2000: Tantia Takes on no Less than EMC and Tivoli

Tantia Technologies cannot be accused of aiming low: its goal is to pose a threat to EMC and Tivoli in SAN management software storage for mainframes and open systems.

Behind the start-up is the parent company, a $44 million German firm called Beta Systems Software AG, long a specialist in document management for mainframes that has now decided to focus on SANs. To do this, it acquired, back in December ’98, the 12 year-old Canadian firm Harbor Systems, a pioneer in the SAN market. This year, Beta decided in addition to reorganize its money-losing US activities, to rename them Tantia Technologies with HQs in Boulder, CO, recruiting as president and CEO Victor Walker, the former president and GM of the Bull Group’s storage server business unit, before a brief stint at Benchmark Tape Systems and after many years at StorageTek.

On its advisory board sit storage veterans Ken Hendrickson, the chairman and CEO of Ancor Communications along with John Boose, who headed HP’s storage activities.

“Our objective is to launch an IPO within the next 12 to 14 months,” said Walker.

The company numbers 100 employees, with offices in Australia and Calgary, Canada in charge of software development and customer support.

It is also relying on Beta subsidiaries in Europe, as well as its strategic partner, Hitachi Data Systems. It operates in the high end, with an average sales size of $200,000 to $300,000 per customer.

Walker pointed out that approximately 30% of North America’s Fortune 1,000 companies and more than 60% of Europe’s largest companies currently use one or more Beta enterprise-productivity-management applications or Tantia’s storage management products.

The most recent product is called Harbor Filer Transfer, a data movement solution between OS/390 mainframes and open system servers with Escon support rather than TCP/IP or SNA for better speed. It offers connections from RS/6000-to-Channel via an IBM2754 Escon adapter, SCSI-to-Channel via BusTech’s Datablaster 2, and NT-to-Channel via the Polaris PCI Escon channel interface. It also supports the Hitachi Freedom 7700.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 150 on July 2000 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.

Note: Beta Systems acquired Tantia for an undisclosed amount in April 2000.