SolarWinds, Hyper9 and performance management

The folks at Solarwinds recently acquired Hyper9 to extend their product portfolio to include virtual environment management. Prior to this acquisition, Solarwinds offered the Orion family of application performance, network, storage and system management products.

How SolarWinds presents itself

SolarWinds, Inc. (NYSE: SWI), a leading provider of powerful and affordable IT management software to more than 97,000 customers worldwide, today announced that it is set to address the unmet and growing needs of systems and virtualization administrators. The company is entering the application performance and virtualization management markets through the launch of SolarWinds Application Performance Monitor (APM) and the acquisition of Hyper9, a privately-held virtualization management software provider based in Austin, TX.

Overview:

• SolarWinds is entering the application performance and virtualization management markets through the launch of SolarWinds Application Performance Monitor (APM) and the acquisition of Hyper9 and its next-generation virtualization management products.
• The company’s experience in making powerful, easy to use network and storage management products accessible to users in a wide range of businesses gives it an advantage in addressing the unmet needs of IT organizations as they work to ensure the performance and availability of business-critical applications and virtual infrastructure.
• The SolarWinds product family now covers the fundamental aspects of business-critical applications and IT infrastructure – network, storage and systems –with integrated visibility into both virtual and physical environments.

SolarWinds Application Performance Monitor (APM)

• SolarWinds is launching its application performance management product. SolarWinds Application Performance Monitor is a comprehensive application and server management product that provides visibility into the performance of critical IT services, the underlying application components, the operating system, and the Windows, Unix and Linux server resources on which they run.
• SolarWinds Application Performance Monitor pricing starts at $2,495 (USD), with the first year of maintenance included. For more information, visit the SolarWinds website, download a free 30-day evaluation, or call 866.530.8100.

Hyper9 Acquisition

• Hyper9’s virtualization management offering adds optimization, capacity planning, configuration and chargeback reporting for virtualized server environments to the SolarWinds portfolio.
• SolarWinds expects to offer the virtualization management products at pricing starting at $3000 (USD), including the first year of maintenance – a fraction of the cost of current virtualization management providers. This price point will make the SolarWinds offering one of the most comprehensive and affordable virtualization management offerings in the market.

Snapshot analysis

It appears that Solarwinds is tightly focused on targeted, easy-to-use, but powerful tools rather than extensive management frameworks. They appear to have also chosen an approach to product pricing and distribution that would be highly attractive to system, network and application administrators rather than trying to appeal to IT or facilities management. The addition of Hyper9's portfolio makes a great deal of sense.

Solarwinds and Hyper9 both offer products designed to be highly functional, powerful and can be acquired and then put to work quickly without a great deal of extra training.

It's a good "under the radar" approach to competing with suppliers of management software, such as BMC, CA and IBM.