GridApp Systems hopes its Clarity lasts longer than a moment.
The three-year-old company has retrenched its Clarity line of database management software to erase many of the time-consuming maintenance tasks database administrators (DBA) face during the daily grind by automating those jobs, completing them and presenting them in single view.
GridApp Founder and CEO Rob Gardos said Clarity complements data center automation software from companies such as Opsware or BladeLogic, by queuing up configuration management, patch management, auditing, compliance, replication and encryption in a variety of database products.
Clarity also clones, scales and repairs databases and ensures business continuity and disaster recovery.
“Clarity shifts the DBA away from repetitive, firefighting tasks to more of a revenue resource. Because we’re automating a lot of those activities, DBAs have time for development tasks or tuning tasks,” Gardos said.
“We’re also shifting control of the data. Right now, the DBA lies at the center of data control and we’re looking to shift that control to the enterprise.”
Gardos said GridApp is also attacking the problems enterprises face with owning a variety of databases at a time when federal compliance requirements are forcing enterprises to rethink how they manage their software.
“Not only do you have more of everything, but you have the government saying, whether it be HIPAA or Sarbanes-Oxley that the management of the data and the integrity of the data is incredibly important,” the CEO said.
Products such as Clarity aren’t necessarily novel, but they are an integral part of the multi-billion-dollar management software market.
New York-based GridApp is wading into a sea of competition from top management software makers such as Computer Associates, BMC Software, Quest Software and Embarcadero Technologies.
Gardos said GridApps’ key differentiation among the portfolios of those larger companies, is that Clarity manages all of the leading database platforms, including systems from Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and Sybase, rather than just some of them.
The challenge is that major database vendors such as IBM, Oracle and Microsoft go out of their way to tell customers that their products manage themselves and don’t require complementary solutions like Clarity.
Gardos’ hope is that GridApp will prove more nimble and outflank the larger vendors by speeding highly-targeted solutions to market to meet customer demands.
GridApp will launch the software at Gartner’s Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando later today.
