By Guest: Margaret Hoagland
Company: SIOS Technology
Show: Mission Critical
Topic: High Availability
Application-aware high availability protection requires technical sophistication, but purchasing it shouldn’t require a pricing decoder ring. SIOS Technology has simplified LifeKeeper v10 pricing to eliminate the friction customers and partners experienced with previous models while maintaining the application-specific failover intelligence that makes SIOS different.
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The Application-Aware Advantage
Margaret Hoagland, VP of Global Sales & Marketing at SIOS Technology, explains what makes LifeKeeper distinctive. “We make sure that our products are application aware so when the failover happens, that failover is conducted in a way that is consistent with the specific application or database’s requirements,” she says.
Generic high availability solutions treat all failovers the same way. They detect failure, restart services on another node, and hope for the best. Application-aware HA understands that SQL Server, SAP, SAP HANA, Oracle, and other enterprise applications have specific requirements for how they should fail over to maintain data integrity and application state.
SQL Server, for example, requires database connections to be cleanly closed, transaction logs properly managed, and specific startup sequences followed. SAP HANA has different requirements around memory management and data synchronization. Application-aware HA embeds this expertise into the failover process.
The Pricing Complexity Challenge
This technical sophistication created purchasing complexity. “That means that we have to have a separate little module for each of those sets of requirements—one for SQL Server, one for SAP, one for HANA and so on and so on,” Hoagland explains.
SIOS also maintains modules for different deployment environments. Cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud have specific requirements different from on-premises infrastructure. Each combination of application and environment required customers to understand which modules they needed.
“There are a lot of different moving parts for the end user to think about when placing an order,” Hoagland notes. This complexity created friction in the buying process, required significant interaction with sales teams to configure quotes correctly, and made it difficult for customers to understand the total cost of ownership.
Simplified, Transparent Pricing
SIOS has restructured LifeKeeper v10 pricing to remove this complexity. “We have created a pricing schema that is very straightforward and easy for customers to understand what they are purchasing, how they are purchasing it, and the value they receive,” Hoagland says.
The new approach maintains the technical capability—application-aware modules still exist and still deliver specialized failover intelligence—but packages and prices them in ways that make sense to customers. Rather than requiring buyers to become experts in LifeKeeper’s modular architecture, the pricing reflects how customers actually think about their HA needs.
Trust Through Transparency
Hoagland emphasizes the philosophy behind this change. “We are all about transparency. This is a trust business, so we wanted to make sure that our customers know exactly what they’re buying and what they’re getting and how to understand the value of their purchase.”
High availability is fundamentally about trust. Organizations trust SIOS to keep their most critical applications running during infrastructure failures. That trust relationship extends to commercial terms. Customers shouldn’t feel uncertain about what they’re purchasing or discover unexpected limitations after implementation.
The simplified pricing model means customers can evaluate LifeKeeper v10 clearly, compare it to alternatives transparently, and understand exactly what capabilities they’re licensing. For partners and resellers, simplified pricing reduces sales cycle friction and makes quotes easier to configure and explain.
Upgrade Path and Immediate Benefits
For existing LifeKeeper customers, Hoagland outlines what upgrading to v10 delivers. “The immediate benefits are very reliable failover and the ability to see, at a glance, the status of their clusters clearly,” she says.
Beyond immediate operational improvements, v10 provides strategic value. “The main benefit, as we move forward, is that it serves as a foundation for future development, allowing us to add features more quickly, ensure the interface remains very user-friendly, and maintain consistent, highly reliable failover.”
This architectural foundation means SIOS can deliver new capabilities faster without requiring customers to wait for major version releases. The unified console and simplified internals reduce development complexity, letting SIOS respond more quickly to customer needs and emerging technologies.
Application-Aware Without the Complexity Tax
The LifeKeeper v10 pricing simplification represents SIOS’s recognition that technical sophistication shouldn’t require purchasing complexity. Application-aware failover intelligence remains—SQL Server still fails over correctly, SAP HANA still maintains data integrity—but customers can now purchase and understand this protection straightforwardly.
For organizations evaluating high availability solutions for mission-critical workloads, SIOS has eliminated a common enterprise software frustration: confusion about what you’re actually buying. LifeKeeper v10 delivers transparent pricing that matches the trust relationship customers expect when protecting their most important applications.
