Monday, October 17, 2011

Aveksa hopes new data access tool opens markets

By Rodney H. Brown

Waltham-based enterprise data security form Aveksa Inc. has launched a new product that taps the open source model and will hopefully bring in a new customer base to the company.

Aveksa’s new product is called Access Fulfillment Express, and the word “fulfillment” is a key, according to Jason Garbis, vice president of marketing. The idea is to make adding and removing employees from access to data assets as easy as ordering something from Amazon. Also new to the company is the fact that AFX is built on an open source service bus, allowing enterprise customers to modify it for their own needs at will.

“These are all technically advanced organizations and they have the resources to be able to customize this,” Garbis said.

The idea behind AFX is that it will be seen as an alternative to “traditional heavyweight and proprietary provisioning system integration,” according to a release from the company. The new use of open source integration model will allow AFX to be more easily set up to run as an automated feature, at a lower cost and with less effort than traditional provisioning, the company said. Garbis pointed out that they are not looking to have enterprise customers already using a provisioning system to scrap anything they are now using, but to consider AFX as an alternative instead of another provisioning system install for their next expansion. 

“Corporations have really spent a great deal of time integrating provisioning systems with the applications being run in the enterprise,” he said. “We’re not espousing or recommending a customer rip out what they have.”

Garbis hopes that the new AFX product kicks the company’s already solid growth into overdrive. Now at 85 employees, Aveksa has more than doubled its sales force since the beginning of the year, and Garbis said, “We have a pretty aggressive growth plan for hiring.” He anticipates growth in the range of 25 to 30 percent over the next year, but that could explode if the use of data security takes off like many experts say it has to.

Late last year, Aveksa hired a new CEO, Vick Viren Vaishnavi, who was a veteran of BladeLogic Inc., and named former BladeLogic COO John McMahon to the board of directors. According to the company, McMahon becomes the 10th person to join Aveksa from BladeLogic.

Aveksa, founded in 2005, last took in funding in February 2009, when it raised $10 million in a Series C round. Returning investor FTV Capital, formerly called FTVentures, led that round, and was joined by fellow return investors FirstMark Capital, formerly called Pequot Ventures, as well as Charles River Ventures.