"From a cost standpoint, there's no comparison between Northern Parklife and Veritas," he says. "Northern is bang for the buck. That's very important... We were looking at thousands of dollars for [Veritas], and hundreds of dollars for Northern."
HK Systems, which has about 900 employees and a little more than 120 Windows servers, is using Northern Parklife's existing modules, and Dvorak says he's eagerly looking forward to the release of the next two modules.
But of course, Veritas and a long list of other large companies that compete in the SRM space have some advantages over the Swedes. Northern Parklife's new SRM offering will also have to compete with products including Computer Associates International Inc. (CA)'s (NYSE: CA) BrightStor SRM and EMC Corp.'s (NYSE: EMC) ControlCenter and its StorScape products from its acquisition of Astrum Software in April (see EMC Sucks Up Astrum).
Besides name recognition, these industry giants have the advantage of addressing a larger market beyond Windows. But Dennis Martin, an analyst with the Evaluator Group, says it could play to the Swedish company's advantage that it's so focused. "They know their space," he says. "They're not trying to take over the world."
Vernersson insists that Northern Parklife is doing very well for itself. The company, which is privately held (and which won't reveal how much funding it's received to date), already has more than 22,000 customers for its existing system administration products. Most of those customers, according to Vernersson, buy Northern Parklife products through channel partners such as Hitachi Ltd. (NYSE: HIT; Paris: PHA).
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