Aelita eases migration pains
- Article 41 of 77
- Information Age, June 2002
The experience of setting up a web site running on Windows NT prompted two Russian entrepreneurs to create tools to ease other people through the same difficulties.
Surveys of CIOs looking to implement Microsoft's directory services software, Active Directory, frequently reveal that most think it the software is too complicated to implement. But according to Ratmir Timashev, CEO of Aelita Software and an expert privy to Microsoft's engineering road maps, they are only postponing the inevitable. “Microsoft wants to take over the enterprise, and to do that, they're going to create a single store for data by integrating Active Directory and SQL Server. If you don't migrate to Active Directory now, you'll just have to do it in a few years' time.”
In 1996, Timashev started his own ecommerce site, drawing on the skills of his college roommate Andrei Baronov (now CTO of Aelita) to master the back-office programming.
But they took the then-unorthodox decision to serve their site from a small, Windows NT 3.51-based server. The difficulty of hosting a site from Microsoft's department-focused product prompted Baronov to write some tools to make the job easier, which the duo decided to make commercially available.
Aelita now has approximately 200 employees - 160 employed in R&D in Russia - and products in four main areas: migration to Windows-centric enterprise systems; administration of Active Directory and Exchange server; security; and recovery from configuration and directory-related problems. It has also just opened a European head office in Reading.
According to Timashev, Aelita targets large corporations with 3,000 or more users. Organisations that use Aelita's software to ease their Windows 2000 migration problems will save $50 per user, the company claims, while Exchange 2000 migration will be $25 or so better off per user. Those that do not believe him, he challenges, should “put it in their lab” and compare it with other vendors' systems.
The company has managed to remain privately funded during its expansion and the future looks good for the company, since there will always be a need for products that make Microsoft's easier to use. “Microsoft wants to dominate the enterprise,” argues Timashev. “To do that, they take giant steps and release new operating systems every 18 to 24 months. They can't fix everything in that time. We just have to guess where the gaps will be.”