Twenty years is an eternity when measured in nanoseconds. Aperture Technologies Inc. of Stamford, which just reached that birthday, has mastered four computer generations in that time and witnessed the likes of floppies and cell phones as big as shoeboxes, not to mention companies that once made them, plummet into the antediluvian strata.
In its two decades, Aperture has become a global provider of software for managing the physical infrastructure of data centers. Harold Feinleib and Roy Pestone founded the company in 1987 during the computer industry”™s Jurassic age, with mainframes taking up entire floors of office buildings.
“This anniversary is a celebration of Aperture”™s evolution and a chance to reflect on how the market has changed ”“ and how we as a team and company have adapted to these changes to continually deliver products to meet and exceed our customers”™ and partners”™ needs,” said Bill Clifford, CEO of Aperture.
The company began with a product demo on a floppy disk and two signed customers, Dow Jones and Crum & Foster. These two clients provided market validation for Aperture”™s product, at that time called the Graphic Data Center Manager. This DOS-based software application was designed to help data center managers faced with the challenge of where to fit cumbersome and energy-greedy mainframes into their data centers.
Aperture began selling and shipping product that year and grew its customer list, gaining financial, retail, government and telecommunications clients across the United States. The company was profitable within six months. In 1989, Aperture launched its data management product in Europe through local distributors, though it wasn”™t until 2002 that it opened its own offices in the U.K. Today, Aperture has a presence in 20 countries.
Feinleib understood the importance of data centers. Many companies and vendors did not recognize their data center operations as related to industry strategy.
Feinleib began independent development on a next-generation product called Aperture, launched in 1990 at the MacWorld convention. The product went through several stages of development, including a move to Windows in 1995. The Windows version opened the market for Aperture, helping the company to more than double its revenues by 1997. In 1999, the company continued to advance its technology by adding workflow, visualization and Web-based capabilities. This technology platform underpins Aperture VISTA today, enabling it to become the industry standard data center planning and management tool for solving space, power and cooling challenges, according to the company.
Aperture has been present as the industry progressed from computer warehouses and dedicated server rooms to multi-acre sites spanning areas larger than football fields. With the acquisition of The Advantage Group, completed earlier in 2007, Aperture was able to intergrate real-time monitoring into its VISTA solution.
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According to Clifford most people think of New York and Boston as the hubs of the data industries but as a native of Fairfield County, growing up in Greenwich and attending the University of Connecticut, he felt it”™s no surprise Stamford has become a base for the technology industry.
“Stamford has become a technology hotspot,” said Clifford. “This is a great labor market. It”™s got a little bit of everything.”
Today, Aperture”™s customer list includes companies in the Global 500 and Fortune 1000 lists. The range of industries that rely on Aperture”™s solutions includes financial services, airlines, insurance, higher education, utilities, retail, government, telecommunications and pharmaceuticals.
“We”™ve seen some fascinating changes as the data center market has exploded in the last 20 years,” said Feinleib, founder and vice president of product development at Aperture Technologies. “It”™s changed more than once beyond recognition,” “At one point convincing companies to part with their money for data center management software was a real challenge. Now the management of the data center infrastructure is not only crucial but also strategic. It is a very different market today than it was in 1987. In that time we”™ve seen many companies come and go and it makes me proud to be here 20 years later and to see the success that Aperture has become. It is a real tribute to our employees. They are always ready to stretch and meet new challenges.”
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