History 2002: New Storage Venture StorScape Between Irish and Slovenian Companies

The Ljubljana, Slovenia-based Hermes Softlab Group (HSL) and Irish Eurologic Systems has founded a new joint-venture, StorScape, to develop storage management software.

Bostjan Bregar, chief corporate development officer at HSL has been named executive president.

The idea for the 2 companies located in tiny EU countries is to capitalize on Eurologic’s distribution channels and hardware expertise combined with the software resources of HSL.

The venture, owned 51 % by HSL and 49% by Eurologic will be headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, with the main sales office in Boston, MA, and a development center in Slovenia.

We know very little about HSL, a 10-year old profitable firm, which employs even some 550 software engineers and generated €32 million of revenues in 2000 (+47% compared to 1999), with 90% of its services exported to USA and European markets, thanks to offices in Stuttgart, Germany, Budapest, Hungary, Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Mountain View, CA.

Its specialties: e-banking, telecom, network and systems management, web services, and of course, storage and data management.

Among its storage customers, 2 stand-outs are HP (for OpenView) and Grau Storage.

HSL’s first R&D lab opened in 1993 with the development of HP’s Omni Back product. By 1999, Omni Back II had become one of the leaders for Unix enterprise backup software.

For the moment, however, StorScape’s exact goals are still somewhat vague: “to offer open-systems software storage solutions.”

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 170 on March 2002 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.