Virtual Instruments’ First Quarter Results

Virtual Instruments, provider of the NetWisdom SAN (storage area network) optimization solution, has demonstrated success in its first full quarter, marked by sales growth and bookings that significantly exceeded forecasts in the U.S. and Europe. To help customers continue to cut costs through improved performance of heterogeneous and virtualized data centers, the company has accelerated investment in both product and partnership roadmaps.

Highlights

• In its first full quarter of operation since the carve-out from Finisar, Virtual Instruments booked more NetWisdom sales than the preceding 12 months of product sales. Gross profit for this quarter’s bookings exceeded expenses by 22 percent, putting Virtual Instruments in an excellent position to accelerate product investment. The company continues to see rapid adoption of the NetWisdom solution in both the U.S. and Europe due to the cost savings benefits of the solution.
• To help customers continue to cut costs and optimize performance of complex virtualized and heterogeneous data centers, the company is strengthening its partnership with VMware and other alliances and accelerating its product roadmap for the next six months, with new releases planned for November 2008 and early next year. The aggressive product-development strategy also includes leveraging partnerships and integrating solutions that increase consolidation and optimization by providing unprecedented visibility into the virtualized service delivery cloud.
• Industry investors who recognize the importance of the NetWisdom solution in helping enterprises address the challenges of heterogeneous and virtualized data centers funded the recent spin-out of Virtual Instruments from Finisar Corp. The private equity syndicate includes Jim Davidson, Steve Mankoff, Riverwood Capital, Mark Urdahl; spin-off parent Finisar Corporation remains a strategic investor and partner.

Mark Urdahl, Virtual Instruments’ Chief Executive Officer, said: "The demand for NetWisdom is growing because we help customers save money and improve data center performance. We provide insight into layers of abstraction and complexity caused by virtualization and multi-vendor deployments, and we give users the data they need to make informed decisions about system architecture, resource utilization and expansion. As a result, they are able to optimize data center performance and reliability, increase consolidation, and plan for smart growth."

Chris Wolf, Burton Group Senior Analyst, said: "Virtualization is providing unique opportunities to present the underlying physical infrastructure as a service delivery cloud. However, while cloud-based views are good for users and applications, they bring with them added management complexity resulting from numerous virtualization or abstraction layers: server and storage virtualization, single root I/O virtualization, and multi-root I/O virtualization. Tools capable of monitoring all layers of the physical infrastructure and tying them back to dependent virtualized servers or applications are not luxuries  now  –  they are essential components of IT operations and management."