Press release: Soarsoft announces Metalogix’ acquisition of Axceler’s SharePoint Business

Fastest growing SharePoint Independent Software Vendor (ISV) expands to offer best-in-class technology across entire SharePoint lifecycle

  

Soarsoft Africa, a specialist of archive, migration, messaging and collaboration solutions and distributor of Metalogix solutions in Southern Africa, has announced Metalogix’ acquisition of Axceler’s highly successful and profitable SharePoint business, including the industry’s most powerful and widely-used governance and administration product, ControlPoint for SharePoint Administration. The acquisition of Axceler’s related products, employees, assets and brands, positions Metalogix as the fastest growing SharePoint-focused Independent Software Vendor (ISV) in the world.  

“As two of the leading global SharePoint vendors, Metalogix and Axceler had highly synergistic product sets, and joining forces will enable them to offer a more complete offering. As local distributors of both product sets prior to the merger, we are well positioned to offer the South African market comprehensive local presence, support and training from a single vendor. We will also be able to offer a single solution with an expanded range of options to our customers, which makes sound financial sense and further assists to simplify the complexity of SharePoint tasks and management,” says Chris Hathaway, Director at Soarsoft Africa.

The addition of ControlPoint for SharePoint Administration, to Metalogix market-leading portfolio of content infrastructure software establishes the company as a single source supplier of premier products for the management of the entire SharePoint lifecycle.  The expanded Metalogix product portfolio delivers expanded visibility and proactive control over enterprise SharePoint environments. 

It also enables customers to effectively manage the increasing scale of SharePoint deployments, explosive growth in business content and the need to mitigate security risks. ControlPoint for SharePoint Administration enables organizations to easily manage their SharePoint platform and enforce governance strategies that protect business assets while driving employee adoption and productivity. The ControlPoint family of offerings, which have won more than a dozen awards, are used by over 3,000 organisations worldwide to manage more than 14 million SharePoint users. 

“Today’s announcement is truly a game-changer in the SharePoint industry. The addition of the leading SharePoint Governance and Administration management product to Metalogix offering extends our range, reach and leadership in the strategic SharePoint governance market segment.  This investment is another milestone in our strategy to provide customers the best-of-breed content infrastructure software to deploy, operate and protect their Microsoft SharePoint platform, on-premise or in the cloud,” says Steven Murphy, CEO of Metalogix. “SharePoint customers can now buy the premier migration, administration, storage optimisation, and replication technology from a single source – Metalogix.”

“Over the past four years SharePoint adoption has grown tremendously across enterprises of all sizes. As the market has matured, SharePoint has increasingly become a vital and complex asset for tens of thousands of operations,” says Michael Alden, CEO of Axceler. “SharePoint administrators are increasingly seeking single-source technology providers who can provide exceptional technology and offer comprehensive, global 24x7 support. The integration of Axceler’s SharePoint business with Metalogix is a natural evolution of the market and will drive significant value for those managing contemporary SharePoint environments.”

With over 10,000 customers, in 86 countries on 7 continents, Metalogix is the fastest growing SharePoint-focused Independent Software Vendor (ISV) in the world. Metalogix is committed to integrating and enhancing the combined product portfolios to help customers enhance the use and performance of SharePoint.  New and existing customers will benefit from the expanded reach, scale and resources of the new Metalogix, including its industry-leading live 24x7 support program, which manages the most complex global issues.

Axceler’s non-SharePoint business will continue to operate independently supporting solutions for Lotus Notes, Yammer and other collaboration platforms.

About Metalogix

 Metalogix provides content infrastructure software to improve the use and performance of enterprise content. For over a decade, Metalogix has transformed the way commercial and government organisations manage terabytes of content to improve knowledge sharing and collaboration. Today, over 10 000 customers rely on the company’s products to upgrade, migrate, organise, store, archive and replicate content on Microsoft SharePoint, Exchange and Cloud platforms. Metalogix has moved more than 50,000 terabytes of content.

Metalogix is recognized as the fastest growing software company in the Washington D.C.-area by the Washington Business Journal and was named to the 2012 Inc. 500 list of fastest growing companies. Metalogix is a Microsoft Gold Partner, a managed partner in Microsoft’s High Potential ISV Group and GSA provider. Metalogix is a privately held company backed by Insight Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners. Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

To learn more about Metalogix products, please visit: http://www.metalogix.com/powerful.aspx.

About Soarsoft Africa

Soarsoft Africa focuses on Archive, Migration, Messaging and Collaboration solutions, with a successful track record that spans over a decade.  Leveraging the experience gained from some of the largest and most complex information management implementations around the world, we are able to deliver cost effective and successful projects and solutions.  Soarsoft only supports and implements what it considers to be trusted and proven solutions to meet our customers’ specific information management requirements. Soarsoft continues to evaluate its offerings to ensure they maintain market and technological leadership positions, so that clients are offered the very best and up-to-date advice when assessing their requirements.  Soarsoft Africa operates throughout Africa and parts of the Middle East and has offices in both Johannesburg and Cape Town South Africa.

Editorial Contacts:

Soarsoft Africa

Chris Hathaway

Tel: 021 200 2393

Email: chrish@soarsoft.co.za

Evolution PR

Lesley Rencontre

Tel: 011 462 0679

Email: Lesley@evolutionpr.co.za

Press Release: Soarsoft Africa announces the first fully integrated SharePoint storage, backup and recovery solution - Metalogix StoragePoint

Soarsoft Africa, a specialist of archive, migration, messaging and collaboration solutions, has announced the release of Metalogix StoragePoint 4.2, the industry’s first and only fully integrated SharePoint storage, backup and recovery solution. Established as SharePoint’s top-selling storage optimisation product, the new release expands StoragePoint’s range of capabilities to include automated backup, either on-premises or in the cloud, and the ability to granularly restore lost content all the way down to the document level.

Says Chris Hathaway, Director of Soarsoft Africa: “It is essential for organisations of all sizes to ensure that a SharePoint backup and recovery strategy is in place. This becomes even more critical as the amount of data and importance of the content increases with the wider adoption of SharePoint as a Document Management and Collaboration solution for the enterprise.  StoragePoint is often already required or in place to archive and off-load content from the database and by automating your backup and recovery in the same platform, there are significant gains in efficiency and over all simplification of the platform. Furthermore, it caters to those organisations that leverage Cloud Storage and Backup Infrastructure, ensuring the solution is aligned with these cloud strategies.”

Organisations must now manage an average of 1 Terabyte (TB) of content within SharePoint environments and that content is nearly doubling every year. Due to this dramatic growth and SharePoint’s ascension as a mission-critical content management and collaboration platform, there is increasing pressure on organisations to develop a cohesive strategy for storing terabytes of content and achieving fast backup and recovery. Organisations have realised that existing storage and backup methods can no longer meet the stricter Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) requirements for data loss and recovery. For example, without StoragePoint, it can take up to eight hours to backup 1TB of content. With StoragePoint, it can be accomplished in minutes.

StoragePoint 4.2 provides a new, comprehensive approach for Binary Large Object (BLOB) storage, SharePoint backup and recovery, all of which can be accessed directly within a single user interface in the SharePoint central administration. StoragePoint uses Remote BLOB Storage (RBS) technology to offload the unstructured content such as Office documents and rich media files – known as BLOBs – from SQL Server to more appropriate and cheaper storage tiers. Externalising BLOBs shrinks content databases by up to 95% and allows databases to be automatically and continuously backed up in mere minutes. The product also provides granular, item-level restore capabilities for lost, deleted or corrupted content. StoragePoint enables these breakthrough capabilities for any version of SharePoint and is the first to do so for SharePoint 2013.

“Our customers have routinely inquired about improving their lengthy backup times and reducing the time it takes to respond to a user losing a document or folder,” says Steven Murphy, CEO, Metalogix. “We developed StoragePoint 4.2 to provide customers a simple way to address their SharePoint storage, backup and recovery needs. Within one familiar user interface, SharePoint administrators and IT professionals can quickly and easily backup and restore content in a matter of minutes as opposed to hours or days. StoragePoint 4.2 is a game-changer for SharePoint backup and recovery that will streamline these processes and improve productivity throughout an organisation.”

By using StoragePoint 4.2, organisations will no longer have to rely on time-consuming backup processes with SQL Backup or a central backup and recovery team to handle lost item requests. Additionally, the product introduces support for backup to the cloud, which will help further drive down storage costs. There are also new features that address event-based retention support for EMC Centera and synchronisation between SharePoint information management and external storage retention policies.

As part of the product release, Metalogix has introduced StoragePoint Express, which gives organisations the chance to use the product at no cost for up to 200 Gigabytes (GB) of content. StoragePoint Express features the RBS capabilities that have established StoragePoint as the market-leader for SharePoint storage optimisation and the new automated backup features.

“StoragePoint has a rich history of setting trends within the SharePoint industry and the introduction of StoragePoint Express continues this tradition,” says Jignesh Shah, Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer, Metalogix. “By offering up to 200GB for free, we are providing a unique opportunity to use our product risk-free and experience its breakthrough ability to improve SharePoint performance, slash SharePoint storage costs and reduce the time it takes to backup and recover SharePoint content.”

About Metalogix

Metalogix provides content infrastructure software to improve the use and performance of enterprise content. For over a decade, Metalogix has transformed the way commercial and government organisations manage terabytes of content to improve knowledge sharing and collaboration. Today, more than 7,500 customers rely on the company’s products to upgrade, migrate, organise, store, archive and replicate content on Microsoft SharePoint, Exchange and Cloud platforms. Metalogix has moved more than 50,000 terabytes of content – more than every other ISV in the marketplace combined.

Metalogix is recognised as the fastest growing software company in the Washington D.C.-area by the Washington Business Journal and was named to the 2012 Inc. 500 list of fastest growing companies. Metalogix is a Microsoft Gold Partner, a managed partner in Microsoft’s High Potential ISV Group and GSA provider. Metalogix is a privately held company backed by Insight Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners. Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

About Soarsoft Africa

Soarsoft Africa focuses on Archive, Migration, Messaging and Collaboration solutions, with a successful track record that spans over a decade.  Leveraging the experience gained from some of the largest and most complex information management implementations around the world, we are able to deliver cost effective and successful projects and solutions.  Soarsoft only supports and implements what it considers to be trusted and proven solutions to meet our customers’ specific information management requirements. Soarsoft continues to evaluate its offerings to ensure they maintain market and technological leadership positions, so that clients are offered the very best and up-to-date advice when assessing their requirements.  Soarsoft Africa operates throughout Africa and parts of the Middle East and has offices in both Johannesburg and Cape Town South Africa.

Editorial Contacts:

Soarsoft Africa

Chris Hathaway

Tel: 021 200 2393

Email: chrish@soarsoft.co.za

Evolution PR

Lesley Rencontre

Tel: 011 462 0679

Email: Lesley@evolutionpr.co.za

Opinion Piece: Moving to SharePoint 2013? Migrate, don’t upgrade, and take advantage of new enhanced features By Chris Hathaway, Director at Soarsoft Africa

SharePoint 2013 is one of the most anticipated software upgrades of the year, and many IT professionals are looking at implementing the solution for its enhanced features and particularly, its ability to support mobile devices. However, a large number of organisations are still using older versions of SharePoint, which can pose something of a challenge. According to official upgrade documentation, there is no way to upgrade directly from, for example, SharePoint 2007, to SharePoint 2013, short of first upgrading to SharePoint 2010, with all of the expenses and time that comes with this.

Moving to SharePoint 2013 offers organisations access to many new features, and one of the biggest developments is the ability to support mobile devices. In an increasingly mobile world, this is becoming critical to enable knowledge sharing and collaboration across an organisation, including to users on smartphones and tablets. In addition, SharePoint 2013 enables access to new MySites and new Community Sites, which are increasingly important given the rate of content generation and growth. Other features include managed navigation based on metadata, microblogging and activity feeds, e-Discovery integration with Exchange, and SEO-friendly URLs, all of which are highly beneficial for the modern organisation.

However, while many enterprises are highly interested in adopting SharePoint 2013, there is concern and budget constraint around the upgrade path as the versions cannot be ‘leapfrogged’. The upgrade is defined as a complete point-to-point transfer of the SharePoint databases from one version to another, and Microsoft does not support this path from older versions. However this is not the only solution.

While upgrading may not be possible, migrating is. Migration involves copying and moving items from a database, but not moving the database itself. All of the data within a SharePoint database can be read and copied, and then reproduced in a different database on a new SharePoint farm. Using advanced SharePoint migration tools, organisations can move from SharePoint 2007, or even earlier versions, directly to SharePoint 2013, and take advantage of the benefits. Content, site structures and permissions that support the content and workflows that use the content, can all be migrated.  New SharePoint templates can also be applied to the structure as part of the migration process. The right product will also ensure that no dependencies or limitations are created related to the SharePoint data in either the old or new database, ensuring full functionality.

A SharePoint migration also allows for items to be moved in a more granular fashion. In other words, it is not necessary for items to be moved to the exact equivalent location in the new SharePoint database and a "Big Bang" approach is avoided. This means that a new structure can be created to more closely match the way users utilise SharePoint and more effectively solve business problems using the tool. It is also possible to keep SharePoint more organised and aligned with business needs, as SharePoint migration tools also include content organisation capabilities. This makes it easier to split or merge sites as and when necessary, inject metadata or to reorganise the structure of a SharePoint farm in line with changing business requirements. 

Put simply, a SharePoint migration leaves the database in place, but allows for everything else to be copied and moved. This means that upgrading first to SharePoint 2010 is completely unnecessary for organisations wishing to move from 2007 to 2013. Irrespective of your current version of SharePoint, it is now possible, using advanced SharePoint migration tools, to move to SharePoint 2013 in a single, cost-effective step.

Editorial contacts:

Soarsoft Africa

Chris Hathaway

Director

Tel: 011-7812323

Email: chrish@soarsoft.co.za

Evolution PR

Liesl Simpson

Tel: 011-4620628