Virtual Instruments Achieves Profitability in 2016

Virtual Instruments, Inc., reached profitability on the back of strong 2016 sales, and has transitioned the company into the industry’s first application-centric infrastructure performance management (IPM) provider for the hybrid data centre as a result of its merger with Load DynamiX and the acquisition of Xangati. 

The company now extends its value proposition to infrastructure, application delivery and DevOps teams, who work collaboratively to assure the performance and availability of constantly changing business-critical applications.

It also adds Ray Villeneuve as president and COO, and Lisa Alger as SVP of engineering.

As enterprises worldwide adopt hybrid data centre strategies, IT infrastructure management teams face escalating scale and complexity. Global businesses run complex, mission-critical applications on shared, multi-tenant infrastructure. To ensure availability and performance at low practical cost, IT teams must look beyond the traditional domain-specific performance monitoring solutions they have traditionally used. They need visibility and analytics across application and infrastructure domains to proactively ensure application performance.

According to Gartner, “In the past four to five years, the ITIM market has moved toward holistic monitoring and away from domain-specific monitoring (server, database, network, etc.). I/O leaders are benefiting from a refreshed ability to reduce the number of tools needed to monitor multiple operation areas. In many cases, I/O leaders are able to improve collaboration across teams by adopting ITIM tools that work across domains.” (1)

Virtual Instruments’ 2016 strategy addressed this demand and resulted in a purpose-built app-centric IPM platform that delivers the only vendor-agnostic, cross-silo, auto-correlating, real-time performance and availability solution on the market. It enables IT infrastructure leaders to assure performance and quickly identify and proactively resolve issues. Its customers have described the improvement in their ability to pin-point deeply cloaked root causes of performance issues, as the equivalent to “moving from a compass to a GPS.” It delivers a unified view of infrastructure performance from the context of the applications being served, whether they are deployed on premises or in the cloud.  

Key achievements in 2016 include:

• Merger with storage performance analytics company Load DynamiX
• Acquisition of cloud and virtual infrastructure monitoring leader Xangati
• Double-digit revenue growth leading to the company’s first profitable year
• Triple-digit growth in the VirtualWisdom subscription-based analytics offering
• Release of VirtualWisdom 5 with a next-generation user interface and new analytics based on best practices from hundreds of data centres
• Release of real-time performance monitoring solution for NAS
• Release of Load DynamiX Workload Generation Appliances supporting 32Gb FC and 40GbE interfaces
• Release of Load DynamiX Enterprise Iteration Explorer, simplifying ‘what-if scenario’ planning and storage system performance characterisation
• Introduction of WorkloadCentral, a resource for free workload analysis and modeling in the cloud
• Strengthening of executive team with the hiring of president Ray Villeneuve and SVP of Engineering Lisa Alger 

Clive Longbottom, founder and lead analyst, Quocirca, said: “Organisations are rapidly finding that they have a need for an analytics-driven approach to infrastructure performance management across the increasingly hybrid IT platform, particularly when used to complement existing application performance management (APM) products. In its drive to provide such a solution, Virtual Instruments is demonstrating admirable speed in its integration of the three technologies it has gained through merger and acquisition, and is positioning itself well to address this market.”

Virtual Instruments CEO Philippe Vincent said: “Last year was a game-changer for Virtual Instruments and the markets we serve. Not only did we successfully execute on our M&A initiatives, accelerate our product innovation and expand our leadership team, we also saw steady, substantive growth in our subscription analytics revenues and customer adoption rates overall. With this validation of our strategy, Virtual Instruments will accelerate our development of the industry’s first app-centric infrastructure performance management platform for the hybrid data centre.”

(1) Gartner, Market Guide for IT Infrastructure Monitoring Tools, Pankaj Prasad, et al., 09 May 2016