Picks up Hyper9 for the first and develops the second in house
The ever-ambitious SolarWinds, a longtime network management fixture, is broadening its reach once again.
The company last week entered two new fields — virtualization management and application performance management (APM). This follows the company’s expansion into storage resource management, via the Tek-Tools acquisition, a year ago.
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This is all about meeting the management needs of an increasingly virtualized, converged enterprise IT environment, says Suku Krishnaraj, senior vice president of product strategy at SolarWinds.
“We believe that practitioners increasingly have to deal not only with physical systems but also virtual systems and, hence, the applications that are running on them, the virtualized network and how these applications access backend storage,” he says.
For its entrance into virtualization management, SolarWinds has acquired start-up Hyper9 for $23 million. It intends to retain most employees — both companies are based in Austin, Texas — and move some into key positions, Krishnaraj says.
Hyper9, a much-respected virtualization management pioneer, has incorporated extensible, search-based technology into its VEO tool. It’s gained recognition for “moving beyond monitoring, management and dashboard capabilities and into optimization,” as Albert Lee, senior analyst with Enterprise Management Associates said following an August 2010 VEO update.
As SolarWinds recognizes, these capabilities will become crucial as enterprises move beyond virtualization and begin using private, public and hybrid cloud computing.
“We need dynamic technology that will let us manage these fluid environments,” Krishnaraj says. “Today we do a little management of private clouds but going forward we want to be relevant in managing public and hybrid clouds as well.”
In addition, he adds, Hyper9’s product development strategy mirrors SolarWind’s own. The product is easy to use, deploy and configure and generating views is simple, too. SolarWinds says it expects to price its virtualization management products beginning at $3,000, a lower-than-usual price point.
For its foray into APM, SolarWinds has eschewed the complex approach of traditional players and instead offers a lighter, lower-cost tool that will let IT managers quickly derive value, says Krishnaraj, noting that for some early users that value has come in as little as an hour’s time.
“We don’t believe the big four or midsized companies provide practical solutions that meet the needs of systems administrators,” he says. “They’re too focused on providing heavyweight technologies that don’t deliver value in time and cost tons of professional services dollars to even deploy.”
SolarWind’s Application Performance Monitor, an agentless solution, discovers systems and the applications running on them, then provides a dependency view showing where problems are and getting “straightaway to root-cause analysis,” Krishnaraj says. Application Performance Monitor comes with a broad set of technology and platform support, so IT managers can deploy it across Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint server environments and various network protocols, for example, he adds.
SolarWinds offers a free 30-day evaluation for the tool, pricing for which starts at $2,495.
