Harold Feinleib and Roy Pestone founded the company in 1987 with a product demo on a floppy disk and two signed customers, Dow Jones and Crum & Foster. Aperture says that these two clients provided market validation for its product, at that time called the graphic data center manager, which was designed to help data center managers faced with the challenge of where to put power-hungry 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, and in 1989 Aperture launched GDCM in Europe through local distributors and in 2002 opened offices in the UK. Today Aperture has a presence in 20 countries around the globe.

"We've seen some fascinating changes as the data center market has exploded in the last 20 years. It's changed more than once beyond recognition," says Feinleib. "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."

Last week, Aperture become part of the BladeLogic Data Center Alliance program.