AVTECH: A Company To WatchA Proactive Approach To Environmental Monitoring
By Ericka Chickowski - Processor - Vol.27 Issue 32
AVTECH may very well be the biggest small company you’ve never heard of. Working with approximately 70 people worldwide, the firm produces computer environmental monitoring hardware and software for 80% of the Fortune 500 companies. And yet, companies that have never experienced a data room disaster have rarely heard of AVTECH.
"People aren’t looking for these solutions until they have a problem," says AVTECH founder Michael Sigourney. "If you think about it, you usually don’t look for a dentist until you have a toothache. Unfortunately, it is the same way in our field."
Sigourney says that nearly 80% of new customer purchases occur about two weeks after these businesses have dealt with a disaster. He says this comes down to a reactive attitude inculcated into IT culture over the years. Rather than discussing disaster prevention, most experts and analysts focus on disaster recovery. But once something happens, it’s clear that it is much preferable to prevent than to recover.
"Recovery means reacting after the event," Sigourney says. "After a disaster, management will say, ‘We can’t afford to have this happen again. You must deal with this before it happens.’"
Explosive Growth
AVTECH has survived where others have fizzled out. But unlike other long-running companies that survived the dot-com crash, it didn’t explode with growth until recently, it hasn’t been bought out by the big guys, and its market hasn’t plateaued. In fact, last year the company increased sales by 500%, and it expects to top that growth rate this year.
Sigourney says the sudden surge in sales has a lot to do with a slowly developed product base that is finally gaining traction now that the market is ready to adopt en masse.
"Sensitivity to downtime has made this an area that must be addressed," he says, explaining that his niche is on the cusp of a huge upswing. "Now that we are 25 years into professionally run data centers, people are finally starting to learn that it is kind of silly to deal with these things after the fact."
When AVTECH opened its doors in 1988, it began with the software that would become what is called PageR Enterprise today. The first iterations offered simple environmental monitoring tools for a small number of devices and platforms. As the years went by, the software evolved to include a growing list of features and began supporting nearly every manufacturer and vendor found in the data center marketplace.
Starting at $695 for a 20-object enterprise, PageR Enterprise is an agentless application that offers environmental monitoring, server and power crash detections, Web page monitoring, and monitoring of legacy systems. The application can take automatic corrective action according to parameters the user specifies and provides for automatic contact via cell phone, pager, email, and SMS when an event occurs and when it ends.
PageR Enterprise is only one piece of the AVTECH puzzle. The company also manufactures Room Alert, a line of plug-and-play computer room monitoring sensor devices that are simple to use. The line consists of three models. Starting at $595, Room Alert 7E comes with one built-in temperature sensor and three additional remote temperature sensors that can be monitored from 100 feet away from the box. Additional sensors are available to monitor power, smoke, room entry, and panic buttons.
Starting at $1,295, Room Alert 2E is a rack-mountable device that comes with built-in temperature sensor, humidity sensor, flood/water sensor, power sensor, and three open channels for additional sensors. The Room Alert 2S offers all the same built-in sensors as the 2E, with the addition of a smoke and fire sensor. It comes with two open channels for additional sensors and starts at $1,995.
The company not only designs the software that runs these devices, it also designs PageR Enterprise to work in concert with each of them. This total package is what helps AVTECH dominate the niche. "We have a very strong position because we are the only hardware manufacturer that also develops and understands the software at this level," Sigourney says. "By bundling these two things together, nobody can compete."
AVTECH rounds out its hardware offerings with an affordable device called TemPagR. This simple piece of hardware lets managers use up to four temperature sensors to monitor devices up to 100 feet from the box and is offered for $295.
"We sell that all day long like McDonald’s French fries," Sigourney says. "And with each one of these little boxes we include a limited copy of our PageR Enterprise-we like to think of it as the Happy Meal."
Once managers give this free trial a whirl, Sigourney says they quickly learn that they can’t live without it. By the time the trial is up, most are ready to sign up for the real deal.
The company has also ensured its long-term success by developing a sustainable income model. "We believe that we are the world’s leader in this field," Sigourney says. "Unfortunately, firms like Gartner don’t research our niche, so there is no hard data. But I will tell you that when we go head to head with a competitor, we don’t lose very many sales."
AVTECH may very well be the biggest small company you’ve never heard of. Working with approximately 70 people worldwide, the firm produces computer environmental monitoring hardware and software for 80% of the Fortune 500 companies. And yet, companies that have never experienced a data room disaster have rarely heard of AVTECH.
AVTECH Software, Inc.