SolarWinds Launches New Product, Acquires a Company

IT management software maker SolarWinds had a big day Jan. 19, coming out with a spiffy new data center product and acquiring a company that will help it move into new markets.
SolarWinds launched its new Application Performance Monitor, which offers visibility into the data center and provides a gateway for the company into the application performance and virtualization management markets-sectors expected by many analysts to see high growth in 2011.
Austin, Texas-based SolarWinds also announced that it is acquiring a neighbor, Hyper9, a 4-year-old, privately held virtualization management software provider located in Austin. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Hyper9 makes a downloadable software module that fits into SolarWinds’ platform to help users manage virtual machine sprawl, storage capacity and optimization in a data center or smaller IT system. The addition of Hyper9 and the Application Performance Monitor enable SolarWinds to cover networks, storage and applications with complete visibility into both virtual and physical environments.
Designed for CIOs, not users
“Most products in our space are not really designed with the actual user in mind,” President and CEO Kevin Thompson told eWEEK. “They’re really aimed at the CIO and are for sale with a lot of zeroes at the end [of the price tag]. Everything we do is aimed at the IT manager or sysadmin who is using these tools-and we have taken a lot of suggestions directly from our own customers.”
Thompson said he believes that IT shops are tired of having to come up with homemade solutions to specific data center problems, “and they end up being too complex, too expensive and aren’t responsive enough to address rapid changes in technology.”
The Application Performance Monitor provides visibility into the performance of all critical IT services, their underlying components, the operating system, and the Windows, Unix and Linux server resources on which they run, Thompson said.
SolarWinds Application Performance Monitor pricing starts at $2,495, with the first year of maintenance included, Thompson said.
The company plans to offer Hyper9’s virtualization management software starting at $3,000, including the first year of maintenance, Thompson said.
SolarWinds has about 97,000 customers worldwide.