AutoVirt Shuts Down Months After Launching Channel Program

Data mobility software provider AutoVirt has gone out of business just months after the company launched its channel partner program for value-added resellers (VARs), original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and system integrators (SIs).

The file migration management software provider launched in 2007 and developed its channel partner program in September 2011 with high hopes. At the time, AutoVirt Vice President of Sales Warren Mead said the company was poised to “provide channel partners with all the resources necessary to meet and exceed their customers’ file data assessment, migration and management requirements.”

It’s not as if the AutoVirt Channel Partner Program was completely unsuccessful. AutoVirt had signed 100 channel partners when news of the its closure came down Jan. 4. Fifty of those partners were active, with a combined total of 65 certified sales representatives in the last two fiscal quarters alone. AutoVirt also claimed to have roughly 300 users on the AutoVirt Partner Portal.

But clearly business has not shaken out as Mead, AutoVirt Founder Klavs Landberg and, most importantly, the venture capital firms Sigma Partners and Kepha Partners had originally planned. Hints of the company’s demise date back to November 2011 when AutoVirt CEO Josh Klein and AutoVirt VP of Engineering Caesar Naples stepped down. And sure enough, the company shut its doors just two months later, after the VC groups decided not to fund AutoVirt’s next round of funding. The software provider’s first round of funding netted it $20 million.

AutoVirt’s mobility software was designed to help businesses analyze any data they had stored on Microsoft Windows-based file servers, as well as any network-attached storage hardware. It also enabled customers to move that data across different storage platforms. So why did it fail? One can only speculate, but word is IT departments simply didn’t find a great enough need for the software. Even though AutoVirt’s software did save IT departments time, it wasn’t enough to justify buying the software instead of manually moving the data.

Another reason, said Steve Duplessie, founder of the IT industry analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group, is Windows IT admins were pushing back against using the AutoVirt software, because they couldn’t justify the importance of their own jobs if AutoVirt’s software was being used.

But Mead attributed the company’s demise to its inability to support Network File System (NFS), which he claims many customers and channel partners were looking for.

“Not supporting NFS was our downfall,” Mead said in a prepared statement. “We were turning down four out of every five opportunities partners brought to us. There was a need, but the product didn’t address the need. The vision was right.”