Small to medium-sized companies like Nahan Printing are where Tek-Tools plans to concentrate its resources. These companies cant afford to spend half a million dollars on Unicenter [from Computer Associates International] to get a report, and they dont have the internal expertise to use it anyway, says Huntington-Lee.
Tek-Tools claims it has the edge on other SRM players, such as TrelliSoft Inc. and Highground (acquired by Sun Microsystems Inc. [Nasdaq: SUNW]), because its software resides on the storage server rather than the client. This gives it location independence, enabling an administrator on the road to tap into the tool from any Web browser. The startup also claims its software runs faster than client-based applications, although this hasn't been tested.
So far, the product runs on servers under Sun Solaris, Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) Windows NT and Windows 2000, Novell Inc. (Nasdaq: NOVL) NetWare, and Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL).
As noted, Storage Profiler can track the status of any storage array that supports SNMP. The next version, expected mid-2002, will also collect vendor-specific data from storage arrays made by Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) and EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), the company said.
Actually, this is Tek-Tools' second run as a startup. Founded in 1996, the company started out with Kawa, an XML tool. Kawa was a hit, attracting 50,000 customers. The product was eventually bought by Allaire for $9 million. Tek-Tools channeled this money into building its Storage Profiler.