Judge AVTECH Software by its client list and it's a blue ribbon success. With under 50 employees, the Rhode Island company's users include The White House, the Pentagon, the U.S. Postal Service, the Whitehead Institute, the Environmental Protection Agency, IBM, General Electric, General Motors, Gartner Group and Ford Motor Co. Also using the product are NASA, Biogen, every branch of the Armed Forces, Sony, Hasbro, Boeing, Chase Manhattan, Exxon, MIT and Nuclear Management.
Add to that a 1,000 percent growth rate and $200,000 in earnings for each employee, and it's hard to believe AVTECH does zero advertising. Meantime, there are dozens more A-list users, every one of them betting the entire value of their enterprise technology that AVTECH's environmental monitoring product will perform as promised.
That's because performance of the AVTECH product means the value of their enterprise technology is protected. Calling their hardware-software combination "environment monitoring technology," AVTECH's product provides remote monitoring of many conditions inside data centers, all of which could adversely affect the performance and lifespan of technological assets. Temperature, humidity and flooding are the core conditions watched by AVTECH's Room Alert products, with three open channels for users to pick and choose other conditions they'd like to keep an eye on, including smoke, air and nuclear conditions.
The condition data runs through AVTECH software, triggering alerts to designated recipients when specified conditions are breached. If a room gets hot enough (85 degrees) to damage computer components, the humidity climbs high enough to thwart performance or water reaches a specified height, alerts go out through a multitude of channels, including instant messaging, e-mail, pop-up broadcasts, faxes, phones, pagers or any combination thereof.
The system can also be programmed to shut down servers if certain environmental criteria are met. While that's not desirable for users, it's better than losing assets, and the AVTECH system will automatically turn everything back on again when conditions are safe.
"Everyone likes to talk about disaster recovery. The better strategy is proactive and preventative monitoring," says AVTECH president and founder Michael Sigourney. "We have a really hot solution - proactive preventative monitoring."
AVTECH has headquarters in Newport, R.I., its engineering team is in Washington, and its European sales team is housed in the United Kingdom. Sigourney founded the company 15 years ago to create DEC-specific software, but after Digital was sold a couple of times he redirected focus around what he calls its "hottest product," the Pager Room Alert system.
Designed to run on Windows for worldwide network monitoring, Pager was well received, Sigourney says, because it operates regardless of operating system, from a single installation of his software, with no agents and no rules. He followed with manufacturing of the hardware five years ago, before a remarkable likeness appeared on the market from a competitor that had bought AVTECH's.
But Sigourney says he isn't bothered, because the 15 years of development that went into AVTECH's accompanying software makes his product superior enough to watch over every system behind every nuclear power plant in the United States.
Word of mouth moves Room Alert, with nine out of 10 calls coming in after a company has had a crisis. Sigourney says he sold 10 units last week to a company that lost a dozen servers during a power outage.
Chasing disasters, AVTECH schedules mailings to coincide with weather events that may have affected IT systems. If there's been a flood in Mississippi, a power outage on Cape Cod or a long stretch of humidity in Dallas, AVTECH will be mailing cards to the vulnerable locations for some guerrilla marketing.
"The next time they have a problem, they'll be calling with a credit card," he says. "We're a stealth, hot company that nobody really knows about until they need us. Here we are, this little company that no one writes about, and we're hiring people."
The product is available in eight different licensing models, and prices have come down significantly. Future plans call for a partnership with Digi International to add a live camera option to the monitoring system, enabling IT professionals to look at their data centers while receiving condition alerts.
Sigourney says he's turned down offers to sell his company but predicts that if the day comes when he does say "sell," it will be to one of four companies: Digi, APC, Cisco or EMC. His products complement theirs, he says.
That blue ribbon client list can't hurt either.
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Sales@AVTECH.com
AVTECH Software, Inc.