ExtraQuest Renamed StrataVia

ExtraQuest is no more.

The company announced that it has rechristened itself as the StrataVia Corporation on the same day that the Denver-based database administrative service provider introduced the new Data Palette 3.0.

StrataVia has been using Data Palette, formerly known as RoboDOVC, in its managed service business for the past three years, and has made its database administrative software available in the market for the first time.

The change in name combined with the market-ready Data Palette software, mark a turning point for the company which wants to grow its steady managed services while establishing a place in the database management products space.

“Our managed service business continues to grow and grow and we hope to grow to 100 people by the end of the year, mostly in India,” Brian Staff, vice president of marketing, told eWEEK.

“We would like to have the managed service business grow in tandem with the product business.”

What StrataVia is offering with the Data Palette software is a database administration tool that works with all major databases—Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and the IBM DB2—and is able to capture standard operating procedures.

The Data Palette features include: A standard operating procedures module to help users define and deploy SOPs for recurring or complex tasks; a browser-based report center that allows managers and analysts to access reports from a desktop or laptop; an auditing and compliance feature that maintains a record of all actions applied to the database; a monitoring module that gives a complete view of all the database instances; and a health check the provides metrics on a databases health.

The idea, Staff said, it to free up time for database administrators and allow them to concentrate their efforts on their core business.

Staff considers their automated product to be one of the best because of the companys experience in managing databases globally, knowing what problems occur and having developed a clear process-based strategy for managing “firefighting” tasks.

“What it does is take best practices and put those into the standard operating procedure,” Staff said.

Jill Dyche, a partner with Baseline Consulting in Los Angeles, said the type of automation StrataVia is offering is intriguing. However, she wondered how the company would sell the product since IT managers are protective of their staff, and StrataVia is offering a way to automate practices and thereby offers the potential for personnel reduction.

“Id be really interested to see how they introduce this and how they try to pitch it,” Dyche said.

Ryan Johnson, a database administrator with the Media News Group Interactive in Denver has been a customer of StrataVia for more than two years.

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Since Johnsons company runs nearly 50 newspaper and news sites, he has used StrataVia to help manage the database during off hours.

Although he is responsible for the day-to-day administration of the database, the automated software helps him troubleshoot any problems.

The software is both standardized and flexible to his needs, Johnson said.

“It helps capture any data point you would care about in the system and it is able to give you a complete picture any minute of the day and bring it back into a time window and then correlate and pinpoint the problem,” Johnson said. “The resolution is a lot quicker.”

As for the name change, Staff said ExtraQuest sounded too close to Quest Software and the company wanted a name to reflect its more “strategic” thinking.

The Data Palette is priced at about $6,000 per database instance.

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