Gravic, Inc. Celebrates its 45th Anniversary – Then vs. Now

(Left to right) Brothers Bill, Bruce, and Paul Holenstein at ITUG in 2001
(Left to right) Brothers Bill, Bruce, and Paul Holenstein at ITUG in 2001

We’re both humbled and grateful to be celebrating 45 years in business! The strong relationships and innovative challenges throughout the years have continually strengthened our passion for providing irreplaceable solutions to our faithful client base. Gravic, Inc., an award-winning provider of data collection, transformation, and distribution solutions, has been in business since 1979, albeit under different company names. Our various software solutions have improved businesses and personal lives of over 100,000 customers in 100 countries.

Early History

After all of these years, we are ecstatic to celebrate our 45th year working in the Tandem, a.k.a. HPE NonStop, world. Brothers Bruce and Paul Holenstein started consulting on Tandem NonStop systems while in college. Paul was employee number one because he called up Bruce and suggested that they start a computer company. Their early consulting gigs were with Dr. Bill Highleyman’s Sombers Associates. Younger brother, Bill Holenstein, joined the company as a software developer in the late ’80’s.

In 2001, we renamed our company “Gravic,” based on the word “gravity.” Gravic means “attraction to the core,” representing our core purpose of Improving Society Through Innovation®.

Not all of our efforts were successful. Has anyone ever heard of Multimedia Equipment Works? This was one of our startup failures, designed for automatically digitizing television commercials for proof-of-performance and data analysis. Then there was the ill-fated work for a company that bounced radio signals off meteor trails for early host-to-truck communications. Who knew that cell phones were only months away from being invented and commercialized?

Many of our challenges resulted from changes in the business climate. For example, IRS Section 1706 almost tanked our business in 1986. This infamous Section 1706 caused large companies to stop hiring small computing consulting companies for a while. But, we survived and thrived.

One Company with Four Groups

Today Gravic includes four separate groups: Remark Software, Shadowbase Software, Remark Innovations, and Gravic Labs.

  • The Shadowbase Software Suite provides real-time data replication, streaming, validation, and data recovery for worldwide enterprises running mission-critical applications. Hewlett Packard Enterprise resells our product line globally under the name HPE Shadowbase.
  • The Remark Software Suite offers data collection and analysis using optical mark recognition (OMR) software for image scanners for customers in over 130 countries.
  • Remark Innovations works to create applications for secure elections. Our current Proof of Concept (POC) combines the OMR capabilities from Remark software with the high availability and data security from Shadowbase software into a highly secure balloting system, although the use cases extend far beyond the voting space, for example into generalized ransomware protection.
  • Gravic Labs is a Research, Development, and Licensing group in Gravic, dedicated to developing solutions for complex societal and technical challenges, and currently holds over 90 patents.

HPE Shadowbase Brings Systems to Life with Data Sharing

Of most interest to this readership, we are proud of how HPE Shadowbase software has grown from a simple data replication solution into an entire suite of software that provides immense value to enterprises.

Originally designed to provide post-disaster recovery in business continuity environments, the suite has grown into providing fully Active/Active architectures for automated failover detection and recovery, Data Streaming for data-sharing across an enterprise (including non-HPE NonStop systems), Data Validation to ensure data is accurate and consistent between database copies, and most recently along with new Data Recovery architectures for defending against a malware and ransomware attack, fitting perfecty into the new HPE Digital Resilience Framework.

Shadowbase Software runs on a variety of platforms including HPE NonStop, Windows, Linux, IBM, AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, and more, streaming data between the most popular databases. Our customers thrive in a wide array of industries including finance, stock exchanges, brokerages, banks, insurance, credit card companies, healthcare, government agencies, electrical utilities, retail, transportation, telecommunications, and more.

Gravic and HPE Celebrate Ten-Year Partnership of Innovation and Success!

Since 2014, HPE Shadowbase is globally sold and supported by HPE, with a close collaboration between our Product and Engineering groups. Together, we have achieved thousands of active HPE Shadowbase licenses, with numerous and ongoing Proof of Concepts, and won five significant industry awards for sales growth and product excellence.

HPE Shadowbase is HPE’s strategic go-forward data replication solution:

  • In 2009, we won HP’s Outstanding Partner Award.
  • In 2011, we were named HP’s Enterprise Partner of the Year.
  • In 2019, we were honored to receive the HPE Momentum Technology Partner of the Year Award, for global acceleration of HPE Shadowbase sales.
  • In 2024, we celebrate our tenth year as an HPE Pricebook Partner.

Thank You to All of Our Customers

Our customers and partners are of the utmost importance to us. As we reflect on our past, present, and future, we want to thank you all for joining us on our incredible journey over these past 45 years. We look forward to many more years together and providing the quality solutions that you have come to expect. Contact us at any time to let us know how we are doing and what we can do to assist you with your business challenges.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise globally sells and supports Shadowbase solutions under the name HPE Shadowbase. For more information, please contact your local HPE Shadowbase representative or visit our website. For additional information, please view our Shadowbase solution videos: https://vimeo.com/shadowbasesoftware, or follow us on LinkedIn and X.

Trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. Copyright © Gravic, Inc. 2024.

Author

  • Gravic, Inc.

    Gravic, Inc. is a world leader in providing innovative data collection, transformation, and distribution solutions. For over 45 years, our software product groups have produced technologically advanced solutions that improve the businesses and personal lives of our over 100,000 customers and tens of thousands of OEM end-user licensees.

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