Remora is into the creation business. As chief executive officer Rob Silver says, “we write software that doesn’t exist”. We don’t do websites or anything like that.”
Software development is heavily focused on open source – Linux, Apache, Java and so on.
In an example of the company’s prowess a customer asked Remora to write software that switched on and off his collection of power stations. It drew energy market pricing from power wholesaler the National Electricity Market Management Company (now the Australian Energy Market Operator) to determine electricity prices. When the price rises above a point, diesel power stations kick in to provide the supply instead.
“Software like that doesn’t exist and we like to sink our teeth into it,” Silver says.
Remora began life 10 years ago as a software development house that was “not in vendorland whatsoever”, Silver says.
Five years down the track Remora had built a “fairly substantial” customer base and Silver decided to look at reselling hardware. Given the freefalling margins in hardware compared to software and services, this may have seemed a strange move.
Silver saw finding a vendor as an essential step. “I believe it’s really important to have a strong relationship with a vendor. It’s very hard to survive these days without that. One thing we noticed in our first five years of trading without an alignment with a vendor it can be very hard to grow your business.
“You can’t be a generic software development company. You have to be good at something. You can pick up certain technologies, such as Apache, PHP, etc. But if you select products that are aligned to certain vendors then they can help you grow your business,” Silver says.
Remora took the challenge of moving from software maker to reseller seriously.
“You need planning and to understand the products you sell. First, getting in tight with the vendor is important, and understanding the products and why you’re selling them. Managingcash flow is a big one when you’re dealing with disties,” Silver says.
Another criterion was that the vendor had to be partner friendly. “There are some out there that only tend to focus on tier-one partners and not their emerging partners. Being undercut by tier-one partners was a major problem with other vendors.
“When a deal gets to a certain size, a lot of vendors will try to do the business direct. It’s not a very friendly way to deal with a partner that has grown a customer site. Those are the types of tactics that are not partner friendly.”
One of the most important criteria was innovation. Sun was a favourite because it had started to roll out an extremely substantial open source policy, which was a central interest to Remora’s software development. “They open source a lot of their products like Solaris and a whole lot of other technologies. And they also acquired MySQL.” It also required training engineers in Sun’s portfolio. Silver says he considers Remora to employ some of the best MySQL developers in Australia.
Remora checked out channel programs and partner friendliness with Apple, IBM, HP, Oracle and Sun but the high levels of interaction became “overwhelming” for the small company.
“After two and a half years we dropped almost all of them. We were spreading ourselves too thinly and we couldn’t be good at everything. Rather than sell what customers want we decided to go down a more specialised path. We dropped everything and became a dedicated Sun partner.”
It was a big change and the company took a big hit to the revenue, Silver says. “It’s somewhat risky according to some people because you’re putting all your eggs in one basket. But it’s paid off.”
After Oracle bought Sun, Remora is now a pure-play Oracle partner. “And that’s going extremely well for us,” Silver says. The company more than doubled revenue by selling Oracle hardware and software.
About 35 percent of revenue comes from services, with the balance from hardware and software.
It is ironic that Remora ended up with Oracle, a vendor with a reputation for emphasising direct sales over channel. I put this to Silver who says his experience is the opposite in the wake of the Sun acquisition.
“That’s what we’ve heard as well. I don’t believe that. While any [merger] can be complex, it’s treating us incredibly favourably and we are enjoying the ride. It’s helping us formulate a much broader picture. It’s helping us grow our offerings and [move] into other states as well.”
Remora’s 10 staff are based in Melbourne but the company is on the verge of opening an office in Brisbane, and potentially South Australia. The reseller has established customer bases in the ACT and Tasmania. Sydney, a more saturated market, is not on the cards.
Oracle has consolidated the Sun portfolio and keeping up with the “amazing range” of products in the systems portfolio has been time- consuming, Silver says. That time is paying off through sales in new product areas. In the X64 space Remora is dealing with a lot of opportunities with virtualisation and on Oracle VM, a free, fully supported product from Oracle. Silver says customers are keen to look at Oracle as an alternative to market leader VMware.
“The VMware market is so incredibly saturated that the Oracle VM is better for us. In any marketplace there is always room for more than one product.
“Oracle have a leading market share in the world for databases. It’s not Microsoft, it’s not Sybase. Now they’re rolling out their virtualisation strategy for Intel [processor-based servers]. This is the start of the wave.”
Silver says Oracle will gain market share in virtualisation as the product matures and because of the way it is licensed, which makes it much cheaper than VMware.
Like VMware, Oracle charges a licence fee by processor – but Oracle charges only for the processors used rather than installed. “If you install an Oracle database on VMware you still have to pay for two processors even if it only uses one processor. If you are using Oracle VM you only pay for one processor,” Silver says.
This pricing strategy can save a lot of money on big projects. Silver recently completed a virtualisation project with an education customer who chose Oracle over VMware because the latter was charging $220,000, double Oracle’s price.
“So this is the game we are playing. We believe the technology is mature enough to compete against VMware. If it’s not as good there’s no point backing it. These licensing constraint issues are making it a compelling reason to go down the Oracle VM path.”
Silver says Microsoft, which is also pushing its virtualisation product for free at the entry level, doesn’t offer the same favouritism in licensing with HyperV and client access licences (CALs).
The Splunk opportunity
Remora looks to Oracle for hardware but it is not the whole story. Along the way Remora picked up Splunk, an operational intelligence tool. Silver sees enormous potential with the technology and has become the vendor’s only premium partner
in Australia. “Splunk is a big focus. It ingests
machine generated logs from webservers, switching, firewalls, switches – anything that produces text-based logging, Splunk can ingest it. It allows monitoring of companywide infrastructure.”
Remora is developing consoles that show what is happening inside an organisation. It made a tool for Realestate.com.au which detected when people were “screenscraping” the website’s auction listings and pasting the content on their own, competing websites. The tool won Remora the Splunk award for partner of the year for the Asia Pacific.
Splunk is building an application store, similar in concept to iTunes, where companies can create applications or plugins for common data sources such as Cisco firewalls or Unix servers.
Remora is commercialising a number of different products targeting high-data producers in utilities. One scenario is a product that lets a CEO of an electricity retailer see on a daily basis how many kilowatts have been consumed that day and the corresponding revenue.
-1.jpg&w=100&c=1&s=0)
.png&w=100&c=1&s=0)
