Virtual Instruments: 173% Growth Rate in New Customers in 2017

Virtual Instruments, Inc. accelerated its momentum in 2017 in application-centric infrastructure performance management (IPM).

2017 was company’ best year to date as evidenced by record bookings, a 173% growth rate in new customers and the launch of a comprehensive infrastructure performance monitoring and analytics platform.

In addition, the company announced several strategic partnerships and executive additions.

As enterprises adopt hybrid data center strategies, IT teams are confronted with escalating scale and complexity. Legacy, silo-centric monitoring tools lack an understanding of how applications relate to infrastructure and the relative business value of the applications running on the infrastructure – both of which are vital to proactive prevention of mission-critical application outages and slowdowns.

A recent survey by ESG Research and Virtual Instruments highlights an increased need for application and infrastructure team collaboration in order to avoid performance problems.

As a result, some of the world’s leading organizations have now realized that the solution lies in managing their infrastructure from an application-centric point of view. 2017 marked the beginning of the app-centric IPM era for Virtual Instruments.

Product Updates
In December 2017, the vendor launched the next generation of its infrastructure performance monitoring and analytics platform, VirtualWisdom, to help organizations accelerate digital transformation, improve business agility and proactively manage the cost and performance of their enterprise data centers. By leveraging an app-centric approach to infrastructure management, it allows enterprises to guarantee performance-based SLAs for key stakeholders and applications within the organization.

During 2017, the company also announced version 5.6 of its Load DynamiX Test Development Environment (TDE) and a new family of Load Generation Appliances. This release introduced a high performance and scalable storage workload generation solution for the 32Gb FC and 40GbE connectivity for storage infrastructures. This same release also helps storage vendors identify performance load limits and ensure performance scalability before storage systems are deployed into production environments.

Media and analysts recognized Virtual Instruments’ leadership in the IPM and storage industries in 2017. Storage Magazine named Virtual Instruments Storage Monitoring & Reporting Vendor of the Year in its 2017 Storage Awards, and Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) positioned Virtual Instruments as a Value Leader and the vendor with the Best Predictive Analytics capabilities in EMA’s 2017 Radar Report on Storage Intelligence.

Customer Relationships
Virtual Instruments drove a 173% growth in new customers in 2017, with the preponderance of growth coming in the healthcare and service provider verticals. The company held three regional Customer Advisory Board (CAB) sessions in the Midwest, South Central and Northeastern U.S. regions, where attendees received a ‘sneak peek’ into upcoming product announcements, and customers were encouraged to share their initiatives, challenges, use cases and best practices. The firm used this feedback to guide the direction of new product development, including the latest versions of Load DynamiX Enterprise and VirtualWisdom.

Strategic Partnerships
In addition to refreshing its existing partner program, the vendor announced new technology and reseller partnerships in 2017. In October, it announced a new technology integration with Cisco that simplifies and lowers the cost of real-time performance and availability monitoring for business-critical infrastructures. By integrating Cisco SAN Telemetry Streaming with the VirtualWisdom platform, Virtual Instruments eliminates the need to deploy physical network TAPs and probes, thus extending the platform’s reach within existing enterprise accounts and expanding to mid-market customers.

In order to meet a broader set of customer needs for company’s NAS product portfolio, the company announced a partnership with Gigamon, in network visibility solutions. By partnering with Gigamon and introducing support for the SMB protocol for the VirtualWisdom NAS Performance Probe, Virtual Instruments now offers a comprehensive set of performance monitoring solutions for NAS deployments.

Expanding Executive Team
Virtual Instruments added several industry veterans to its leadership team in 2017 to support the company’s continued global growth. Sheen Khoury and Rick Haggart joined the executive team as EVP of WW sales and SVP of professional services, respectively. Sean O’Donnell joined as the new EMEA MD, where he is responsible for building on the company’s initial success in the U.K., Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

“2017 was the most successful year yet for Virtual Instruments and the markets we serve,” said Philippe Vincent, CEO. “As we continue to accelerate our product innovation and expand our customer and partner ecosystem, we’re empowering IT infrastructure and operations teams to collaborate with their application owners to proactively optimize the performance and cost of the supporting infrastructure. This increased collaboration enhances overall business agility as well as the value of the infrastructure. App-centric IPM will continue to gain significant traction with enterprises in 2018, and we look forward to supporting them in their digital transformations.”