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A Waltham-based company has acquired technology that will help a business better handle its BLOBs.
Metalogix Software US Inc. has been making a tidy profit since it was founded in 2001 in Vancouver, focusing on solutions for companies using Microsoft Corp. software. Lately its specialty has been helping companies convert their legacy content management systems to Microsoft SharePoint.
Last month, Metalogix bought software called StoragePoint from Michigan firm BlueThread Technologies Inc. — essentially buying the bulk of the company as StoragePoint had become BlueThread’s primary business line, according to Metalogix CEO Chris Risley, who declined to discuss the amount that Metalogix paid in the deal but noted it brought on board about 10 employees, which brings Metalogix up to about 100 on staff.
“We got the CEO, the CTO — we got everybody that was critical for the company,” Risley said.
What made StoragePoint so attractive to Metalogix was the fact that it removes the 100-gigabyte cap on the size of a SharePoint database, bumping it up to a massive two terabytes.
“We have been for years providing tools to help people migrate content into SharePoint, either from older versions of SharePoint or from other content management systems that want to get into SharePoint,” Risley said, but that 100-gigabyte cap has been a problem for many potential customers, he said.
The main problem that companies run into with SharePoint’s cap is what to do with BLOBs (Binary Large OBjects, like images, video files, documents, etc.). In today’s high-resolution, high-definition workplace, just a few dozen documents can eat up 100 gigabytes of storage space.
What StoragePoint does is allow the SharePoint user to store BLOBs anywhere they can find the space — on other internal servers or out in the cloud — and save the meta information about that file and the path to it in a SharePoint database field. To SharePoint it looks as though the file is actually in the database, with all of the features SharePoint provides, such as lock-down security and collaboration, but takes up just a tiny fraction of its real size.
Metalogix hopes that by incorporating StoragePoint into its SharePoint offerings, it can expand the reach into the larger enterprise clients that have not been able to use it as a single system across the whole company.
“They are almost certainly using it, but they are almost certainly using it in a departmental way,” Risley said. “That’s going to change for two reasons. The first one is that we have been able to give SharePoint greater scale, and SharePoint 2010 is going to launch in May and that is the first version designed with enterprise vision in mind.”
Another Bay State SharePoint expert has an example of how it can be used in a large enterprise environment. Medfield’s Clearway Technology Partners Inc., which is a Microsoft award-winning partner, said that using SharePoint can allow an enterprise to really boost its efficiency. One of its clients is the Massachusetts Port Authority.
“We deployed SharePoint for them,” said Eugene Rodgers, president and COO of Clearway. “They’re taking what we’ve done and they are building out. They are starting to automate their workflows, for example.”
Risley said that Metalogix has been profitable since it was founded, but it has taken in some funding to help pay for expansion and acquisitions like the StoragePoint buy. Insight Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners have invested $40 million into Metalogix so far, Risley said. And more purchases are on the horizon, he said.
“There are lot of three-man shops that have built some really nice SharePoint products but don’t have the financing to bring it out.”
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