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Funding: $10 million in Series A funding in November 2007, led by Fairhaven Capital Partners and Globespan Capital Partners.
What company offers: The Virtual Essentials suite includes two products: Virtual Insight and Virtual Foresight. Available now, Virtual Insight runs on hypervisors from VMware, Microsoft and Citrix XenSource. Once installed, the software provides details around virtual-machine configurations, including patches, hot fixes and applications. The software also allows IT staff to associate business attributes, such as owner, functional group and trust level, with each VM. Virtual Foresight, which provides policy-based management and automation capabilities, is scheduled to become generally available later this spring.
Why it’s worth watching: "Fortisphere is working on the notion that configuration, change, life-cycle management and even security management of VMs will help desktop, server and storage pros get in front of management issues around virtualization," says Stephen Elliot, a research manager covering enterprise system management at IDC. "For many organizations, the performance management requirements don’t change when they go from physical to virtual servers, and a complete life-cycle approach will have to be put in place to meet those requirements."
Where company got its name: Fortisphere executives wanted to convey the security and control that effective monitoring and policy-based management would deliver to the virtual sphere and combined “fortis” -- which in Latin means strong -- with sphere.
Founded: April 2006
Headquarters: Mahwah, N.J.
Management: Joseph Fitzgerald, co-founder and CEO, previously served as CTO and director of product development for HP’s change and configuration management software business. He joined HP as part of the company’s acquisition of Novadigm, which Fitzgerald also co-founded; Oleg Barenboim, CTO and co-founder, also worked as an R&D leader at HP and previously worked at Novadigm.
Funding: Self-funded by founding members.
What company offers: ManageIQ’s Enterprise Virtualization Management Suite includes technology that allows the software to sit on the virtual fabric and see into virtual-machine containers. With that capability, ManageIQ’s applications can perform network, host and virtual instance inventory as well as manage configurations of virtual servers.
Why it’s worth watching: "ManageIQ has a lot of experience on the client side of things, and they have paid extra attention on how to manage configuration and change across a lot of endpoints," Elliot says. "Most IT shops will have more than one virtualization platform installed, and that means a lot of complexity. ManageIQ has seen that with their Novadigm history, and they are coming at managing VMs with that perspective."
Where company got its name: Company executives pulled together “manage” and “IQ” to represent their goal to offer customers smart management for virtual infrastructures.
Founded: September 2006
Headquarters: Cupertino, Calif.
Management: The company has yet to assign specific roles, but company leaders include Dhananjay Kulkarni,
who has 20 years of experience managing software development and delivery, and Yashodhan Deshpande, who has 15 years of software
development and management experience.
Funding: Self-funded by founding members and angel investors.
What company offers: Niyuta’s vmGalaxy software installs on a Windows server and connects to an environment’s storage to collect asset, operating system and other inventory information from VMs, hosts and guest operating systems. The software requires that its users have administrative privileges on VMs and does not require any agents or drivers be installed. Company officials say the software can access virtual servers when they are powered down to administer patches and take other actions.
Why it’s worth watching: "The biggest gap that still hasn’t been addressed is around patching VMs," says EMA’s Mann. "Niyuta is trying to address VM sprawl issues, but also is putting effort into patch management."
Where company got its name: Niyuta is a Sanskrit word meaning infinite, which relates to the company’s plans to deliver software capable of managing an infinite number of virtual servers.
Founded: April 2004
Headquarters: Portland, Ore.
Management: Wyatt Starnes, founder and CEO, previously founded change auditing software vendor Tripwire, and is a co-founder of Regional Alliances for Infrastructure and Network Security (RAINS), a nonprofit public/private alliance formed to accelerate the deployment of technology for homeland security.
Funding: $10 million in Series A funding in December 2005 from DCM-Doll Capital Management, Intel Capital, SmartForest Ventures and GarageTechnology Ventures.
What the company offers: Enterprise Trust Server is an appliance-based software measurement solution that captures, organizes, and compares what's actually running in your IT production environment with what should be running according to factorss such as set policies and known inventory. The company doesn’t focus solely on the virtual realm, but Starnes explains its technology can track multiple configurations and changes to a degree that would be needed in a virtual environment. "Virtualization really is the killer application for this type of measured systems management," he says.
Why it’s worth watching: "SignaCert can ensure virtual systems are deployed as intended down to a binary level, even as system configurations are changing because of patching and updates. Since there is no configuration drift, a lot of the performance, compliance and security issues are minimized," says Jasmine Noel, principal analyst with Ptak, Noel and Associates. "Since SignaCert can deal with a change to the ‘as intended’ part of the system configuration, you can ensure the most up-to-date version of the virtual systems are deployed, removed or redeployed."
Where company got its name: Company officials combined “signature” and “certification” to create a name that reflected the key technology it offers.
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