Thoughts on Virtual Infrastructure Management

Akorri makes aggressive moves, continues on growth

By Lisa Crewe

The 451 Group recently published a report on Akorri’s recent BalancePoint 3.0 and company progress that I feel is worth sharing. I’ve included the entire article here for your reading pleasure.

Report: 451 Market Insight Service
Analyst: Dennis Callaghan
Date: August 21, 2009

Event summary

  • Virtual infrastructure management specialist Akorri reports 160% growth in its customer base in the first half of this year over 2008. It had 120 customers at the end of June and is on track to add 30-40 more in the third quarter.
  • The company has extended its BalancePoint virtualized datacenter management software with a number of new metrics for both virtual and physical IT servers and storage.
  • Akorri has signed a number of key partnerships with other vendors that should help it reach new customers, and it has been busy filling out its management team with experienced software executives.

    • The 451 take
    Akorri is clearly a company on the upswing, with impressive growth, an extending reach and new, experienced executives who know the virtualization space. In a hotly competitive space, it seems to have a plan and a technology message that’s resonating. With one product and a focus on analytics, Akorri already looked like a takeover target for a larger IT management software firm. With the traction it’s getting in the market and the reach it’s developing, its success may be hard for the larger players to ignore too much longer.

    Details
    Akorri has all the appearances of a company on the upswing. It reported 160% growth in the first half of this year, finishing the period with 120 customers – and it expects to have between 150 and 160 customers by the end of this quarter. The company continues to extend its flagship BalancePoint offering, which manages performance of virtual servers and storage.
    The latest features in the 3.0 release are a virtual machine performance index to gauge performance of individual virtual machines to size them properly for the applications that will reside on them; virtual resource entitlement analysis, which demonstrates actual virtual resource usage vs. allocation; and Microsoft and VMware cluster support. There is also virtual CPU efficiency analysis and SAN switch performance analysis, for Brocade and Cisco SAN switches. Akorri is transitioning BalancePoint’s architecture from Java to Adobe Flex for the sake of better performance.

    Akorri has been active on the partnership front, signing up several resellers this year, including one in Japan, and adding Avnet Technology Solutions as a distributor.

    BalancePoint has become a part of Avnet’s VirtualPath virtual infrastructure management offerings. Storage software developer.  Datalink is a new technology partner, releasing its Virtual Infrastructure Services offering powered by BalancePoint. Akorri continues to work closely with VMware, announcing support for VMware’s vSphere cloud operating system by the end of this year.

    Earlier this summer, Akorri expanded its management team, adding Bill Simpson, a veteran software executive who most recently ran channels and strategy at Virtual Iron Software, as VP of worldwide sales, and former Virtual Iron sales executive Warren Mead as VP of worldwide channels. Jim Comstock, who was most recently director of SAN strategy at NetApp, joined Akorri as VP of business development.

    Competitive landscape
    Akorri is pushing advanced analytics for virtualized environments rather than just straight-up performance monitoring, an area where Cirba and ToutVirtual are also trying to stake out ground. Novell, through its acquisition of PlateSpin, and vKernel are also challengers here. Server and application performance analytics specialists like Netuitive and Integrien have expanded into virtual environments as well. Other companies in the physical/virtual datacenter performance management space include Nimsoft, ScienceLogic, EG Innovations, Uptime Software, Perfman and BlueStripe Software, all of which have at least some analytics capabilities, although their positioning is not quite the same as Akorri’s, which is as much about resource utilization and migration issues as tracking performance bottlenecks. All of these vendors of course have to prove their value as performance management tools above and beyond VMware’s vCenter. All of the Big Four (HP, IBM, CA Inc and BMC) have some capabilities for both performance monitoring and analysis that can be applied to virtual environments, although it’s enough of a niche for startups to exploit and outmaneuver larger companies in, especially at a lower price point, and Akorri offers a pay-as-you-go plan for BalancePoint.

    Reproduced by permission of The 451 Group; copyright 2009. This report was originally published within The 451 Group’s Market Insight Service.

    October 22, 2009 | Filed Under Industry News & Opinion, Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment 

    Vote for Akorri for Virtualization Journal’s 2009 “Readers’ Choice Awards”

    By Lisa Crewe

    Akorri is nominated for Virtualization Journal’s 2009 “Readers’ Choice Awards.” The Reader’s Choice Awards recognize excellence in the Virtualization software, solutions or services provided by the industry’s top vendors.

    Akorri is nominated in three categories:

    o Best Virtualization Management Tools
    o Best Virtualization Platforms Capacity Planning
    o Best Virtualization Platforms Monitoring & Reporting

    Please take the time to vote for Akorri.

    Voting ends October 23 and the winners will be announced the week of November 2-4, 2009, at the “SOA in the Cloud” which is part of SYS-CON’s 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo. Thank you so much for your support of Akorri!

    October 20, 2009 | Filed Under Akorri Blog Update, Akorri News & Opinion, Industry News & Opinion | Leave a Comment 

    Virtual Infrastructure Optimization Podcast

    By Lisa Crewe

    In case you’re one of those people who like to research new products by downloading podcasts and listening to them during your drive time…Doug Brown of DABCC.com recently interviewed John Gavin, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Operating Officer at Akorri. Doug and John discussed the Akorri BalancePoint virtual infrastructure optimization solution. John walks through the BalancePoint solution, the benefits, how it complement the VMware solution, what it takes to install and deploy, how it competes against the other virtualization management solutions, plus much more. Download it here and let me know what you think.

    October 14, 2009 | Filed Under Education, Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment 

    How to Convince Your Boss You Need a Virtual Infrastructure Management Solution

    By John Gavin

    Gone are the days when simply telling your boss that you needed the coolest virtual infrastructure management product just like all the other cool companies doing production virtualization would get it for you . Let’s face it. That won’t work these days when layers of approval are common place, endless questions on capital purchases are the norm and budgets are tighter than ever with ROI and TCO part of every ones lexicon and reason for buying. Ok, so what do you do to get the boss into your camp? There are really three areas you should highlight to get your boss to say yes.

    The first is an old standby – time to resolve problems. Your first line of defense is that the traditional element management tools you have for physically dedicated environments can be useful, but just don’t cut across all the devices and see the levels of virtual abstraction to give that integrated system view which is vital to understanding virtual environments. Those older tools aren’t designed to see through and track all the virtualized elements because they were designed to support one device type in a silo-like fashion. You know the endless hours that are wasted chasing data, going to meetings or sitting on conference calls trying to find the culprits involved in performance problems that are impacting critical application availability, could all be avoided. You suggest even a conservative assumption of reducing this wasted, always unplanned, activity by 50% would be worth the purchase alone. The average Akorri BalancePoint customer with 100 VMs can identify over $500,000 in staff productivity annually.
    Read more

    October 13, 2009 | Filed Under Customer Experiences, Performance, Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment