Shameless marketing plug....registration for our upcoming user conferences is growing fast.

New Orleans - October 6th to 10th
Amseterdam - October 20th to 24th

Tons of technical training, lots of customer presentations, meet the developers and the people responsible for this amazing product of ours and....get to hear me give the opening address.

Oh well, every silver lining has a cloud :)

Sign up here...

Overall good set of results, growth being powered by Remedy and Bladelogic it seems (36% up on one and 1000%+ up on the other)

But...did you see their Service Assurance results (i.e. performance and availability monitoring)...$20m in license bookings for Q1....DOWN 32% year on year. This compares to Nimsoft that reported an 85% INCREASE in bookings.

Now...if we both continued on that trajectory....let's think...we'd be doing more business than BMC in Service Assurance in....not that long.

Imagine that!

(yeah, I know my logic on projections is a little fuzzy...just a bit of fun)

A little late with this due to my vacation, but big congratulations to all of the folks at our long-time customer Rackspace for their IPO. Nice job guys....!

You'll see the press release later today, but Nimsoft has just been ranked by Inc Magazine as the #1 fastest growing private systems management company. Given that we are faster growing than any of the publicly traded companies, I reckon that makes us the fastest growing systems management company on the planet!

We are also ranked as the 36th fastest growing software company.....can you believe it?

Amazing, amazing stuff.......watch for the press release....

Busy on holiday in the Cotswolds at the moment (probably only English people would know where that is).

Relaxing with the kids

Taking the kids on holiday for 12 days in England. Guess where we're going today?

Man Utd vs Juventus.....taking the kids to the Theater of Dreams for their first taste of English football.

During a recent discussion with a 3rd party, I was asked the question "why don't others have the same success with MSPs?" Then, I was asked the question "If your MSP business is so successful, then why don't you just focus there?"

Interesting questions and I thought worth a quick discussion.

Why are other monitoring companies not successful with MSPs?

We are not claiming that we are the only game in town, but competition with MSPs comes from completely different companies than we compete with for corporate enterprise business. Most of the suppliers in this space are offering low-end solutions, because they are trying to reach the "mass market" of MSPs (estimated at tens of thousands in the US alone).

Nimsoft is several steps above this. Our product is a solution that can start small, but grow to be used in the largest, most complex of environments. In reality, the low end MSP-specific solutions are not competitive with us. For example, just last month, a very large MSP/Outsourcer selected Nimsoft as a replacement for their current monitoring solutions and as the partner of the future. This company has 65,000 devices under management.

So, smaller, ambitious MSPs can get in to Nimsoft easily and grow to become very very large, comfortable in the knowledge that they will never be lacking for scalability or feature set with their customers.

But, why don't the big-4 compete in this space?

They try but, for Nimsoft to do business with MSPs, we changed our pricing completely, we changed our license agreements, we changed the way in which we compensate our sales executives, we changed the manner in which we approach the customer and so on. We changed almost everything from our corporate enterprise business in the way that we do business with an MSP. You have to realize that when we partner with an MSP, we are critical to their business and often times, we are dealing with the President of the company.

The big-4 just don't get it and they are not flexible enough to "partner" rather than "sell".

Why don't we only do MSP business?

Simple, because by having end-user enterprise business from some of the largest organizations in the world, we are assured that our product meets the needs of the most demanding environments. Meetings the most demanding needs of end-users, means that we are well positioned to work with our MSPs on what those needs are, and help them to meet them also and learn from our experiences.

Seems simple? Well it is for us because we've done the work to understand these things.

But, I also understand how difficult this can be for companies that have never done it before or don't have an open mind to new business models.

Gets published this morning.

Highlights are:

86 percent increase in bookings
130 percent increase in recurring revenue
Record number of "new logos" - 41 in the quarter

Some things not in the release are:

Both Indicative and NimBUS revenue ahead of our plan
We made these numbers despite not have a US VP Sales in place (announcement on this soon)
Multiple new contracts with several Fortune 500 companies - including a Fortune 250 insurance company that will now be using Nimsoft as its total enterprise monitoring solution
Released the first integrated piece of Indicative and NimBUS - webinars this week to our customers to show this
Monitoring of VMWare environments is included in almost 90% of all new contracts. Significant order from an investment bank to monitor their VMWare infrastructure

We also hired a country manager for Germany during the quarter, a VP Marketing, VP Strategy and a VP Business Development (not sure we've announced all of these yet).

We continue to perform competitive replacements in many situations with HP probably being top of the list but also NetIQ occurring pretty often. Not too sure, but it feels as though Attachmate have really scaled back the investment in support and development for the NetIQ products.

And finally, we don't win them all. We had a competitive loss at the end of the quarter that hurt. We had won the technical recommendation, had the best overall "value", offered the best support but.....one of our large competitors managed to convince the customer that if they bought multiple products all from them, that the integration would be better.

Funny how some customers still believe that. What we clearly did not do a good job of is letting the customer understand that we must integrate with many other platforms because our business relies on it - therefore our integration capabilities will be better than our competitors.

But...it's true that you cannot win them all and we are very very proud of our competitive win rate which is through the roof.

86 percent growth in bookings in this economy!

Going to Europe today for a little relaxation - it's the Nimsoft President's Club for 2007, so part relaxation and part work.

It's been a very busy few weeks, but feels good to know that we are achieving something special.

Meaning that the end of quarter madness is behind us. The big question now is.....how did we do?

Without giving the game away completely (we have an internal presentation tomorrow and I want the employees to know first).

We did GREAT. Another amazing performance. More brand new customers than ever before. New record revenues in every category. Our MSP business showed tremendous growth plus our end user growth is very strong in both the mid-market and the large enterprise (F500 customers coming on board).

Customer satisfaction continues to be very high; repeat business is at an all time high.

Competitors are being replaced or beaten........this is all based on Nimsoft delivering unparalleled satisfaction and maximum value to our customers.

A huge thank you to all of our employees and customers who are making this into such an incredible success story.

(Oops, looks like I gave the game away).

http://www.itskeptic.org/node/644

The days are long, the nights are short, the adrenalin is flowing, the office is buzzing, my family thinks I'm cranky - it must be end of quarter.

Business is going great, and as usual, many companies leave it until the last days of the quarter to make the commitment.

A quick check in salesforce reveals that there are still 67 transactions that are being forecast in the next 2 days. It's this time of the quarter that I really think about our contracts and finance team - they have to stick around well into the evening just to ensure that all the business is booked, invoices issued and license keys cut - big thank you to them.

Better run, this Macbook air is getting some use!!!

and....it's end of quarter....oh what fun!

Got some great new customers coming on board - another Fortune 500 company just the other day committed to us for monitoring of their entire infrastructure. The VP left me a voicemail after the transaction completed letting me know what a pleasure Nimsoft was to do business with and how they are referring their other vendors to look at us because we are so customer friendly.

Also a State government just placed some substantial business with us. Presented yesterday to one of the hottest companies on the planet - customers love Nimsoft - is there any other company that can provide the scalability and functionality that we provide without the complexity and people costs of the big guys? (that's a rhetorical question because the answer is no).

Not much sleep but fun

....a big Nimsoft MSP partner. Named finalist for the Bay Area Entrepreneur of the Year (think about the competition in the Bay Area and you'll know that is a special achievement).

John Varel, CEO of FusionStorm, Named Finalist for Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year® 2008 Award

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - June 20, 2008) - FusionStorm -- "Making Technology Work" -- an award-winning systems integrator and managed service provider, announced that John Varel, CEO and Founder of FusionStorm, is a finalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2008 Award in Northern California. According to Ernst & Young LLP, the awards program recognizes entrepreneurs who demonstrate extraordinary success in the areas of innovation, financial performance and personal commitment to their businesses and communities. John Varel was selected as a finalist from over 90 nominations by a panel of independent judges. Award winners will be announced at a special gala event on 21st June at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco.

John has had a successful and colorful career as an entrepreneur that has spanned over 30 years. Prior to starting FusionStorm in 1994, he was co-founder of The Concorde Group, one of the largest resellers of Sun Microsystems refurbished hardware. He has also launched many successful syndications, including: Meris Laboratories, the largest physician owned clinical laboratory in the nation, and Zephyr Park, Ltd., one of the earliest wind-parks in Southern California.

OMG - I went to see George Michael last night and managed to beg, steal and borrow my way to front row seats.

Isn't it amazing how, after 26 years of being in this business (and all of his other activities), he hasn't lost a single hair and is still as polished as ever.

However, it did give me some hope when I saw that he had a teleprompter with all the words to his songs.

Overall the concert was amazing. I've never seen so many people (both guys and gals) blowing kisses at the same person.

Anyone considered using a low end product for a large implementation? I had occasion recently with 2 pretty large implementations to discuss this with them. On one of these implementations, they were excited about the lower end product until they realized that there was no distributed architecture. What does that mean? The maximum throughput you can put in to the product is what a single instance can handle - thus having a dramatically negative effect on scalability. If you want more then you put a whole separate instance in place - and they don't talk to each other.

Nimsoft has a highly distributed architecture using a multi-tiered model. Hubs (they don't have to be dedicated machines) can be put anywhere and all connect together. It's firewall friendly (1 port, 1 direction), it's encrypted, and it's guaranteed delivery. We have customers running today on thousands and thousands of devices and we can do much more.

My advice to any buyer is to always test the scalability. I know it's not easy to do in a lab environment, but you need to do it.

When do you most need a monitoring tool? When things are going wrong and events are flooding in.

When are non-scalable monitoring tools most likely to fail? Yep...you got it!

Big kudos and congratulations for our customer Actelion in Switzerland. Their founder Jean-Paul Clozel has just been elected as "World Entrepreneur of the Year".

As they say....success meets success....we are proud to be their vendor partner of choice.

Click Here for the press release

In these days of heightened sensitivity to terrorism, if someone mentions that they've found a bomb at the airport then we automatically think the worst.

But, in London today, they discovered an unexploded World War II bomb near London City Airport (and near the site of the 2012 Olympics), which shut the airport and caused extreme delays (see below for BBC news).

How do I know this....because of course, a Nimsoft employee was on their way to the airport at the time. Fortunately there is more than one airport in London.

For me, red eye to NY tonight, then on to Texas and then on to Norway next week. Can someone buy me a private jet please....one that is as fuel efficient as my Prius!


Airport reopens after WWII bomb

Flights in and out of London City Airport have resumed after the discovery of a World War II bomb nearby halted services.

But passengers have been warned delays will continue into the evening.

The explosive was found in Stratford, east London, in the site for the 2012 London Olympics, on Tuesday afternoon.

On Monday, thousands of Tube commuters were delayed when another World War II bomb was found by Bromley-by-Bow station in east London.

Earlier in the day an enforced air exclusion zone was set up and all flights were cancelled, delayed or diverted.

Passengers are asked to contact their airline for the latest travel information.

since I've added to the blog, but it's not of course. Continue to be really busy and business continues to move along nicely.

I presented at the JMP Securities conference yesterday (leading investment bank) which went very well. I also found out that Nimsoft was named to the JMP Securities "HOT 100" private software companies list.....still trying to get a copy of the report but I'm sure I'll manage to do so.

It was interesting also to me that, of the companies that were presenting over the couple of days of the conference - 8 of them were our customers. This really shows how far we have come - I'm sure a couple of years ago it would have been just 1, or maybe not even that.

NimBUS 3.5 is in general availability and our brand new Service Delivery Portal is in beta. The SDP is getting our customers and prospects very excited - in particular MSPs but also end-users. If you haven't already, then ask us for a demo.

Big issue for me right now is recruitment....where are all the good people? I'm going to list some positions just in case anyone is reading this blog - we pay $1,000 for a referral that leads to a hire - so send to your friends.

VP Sales - Americas
Dir/VP Eastern Region Sales
Multiple Field Sales positions, and inside sales positions both in the US and Europe
MSP specialist Account Manager
SE Director
Sales Operations

I think you get the picture. I'm thinking of hiring an in-house recruiter simply to help us deal with the growth and the constant hiring treadmill.

Big deal...almost as big as Compaq...you've got to hand it to HP, they are aggressively going after acquisitions. I wonder how much this was driven by some of the relationships between the Opsware folks and EDS?

Although, some of my friends over at HP are telling me that their software business is not performing too well.

Not sure this means much for Nimsoft apart from that HP are going to be completely distracted again for the next 2 years.

I'd also wonder what this means to anyone that competes with EDS for outsourcing business....personally I wouldn't want to be investing in systems management software from a direct competitor. Sounds like Nimsoft needs to have a plan to help those companies out?

For those of you that think that being the CEO means that you don't have a boss, you need to think again. I actually have 3 sets of constituents that I "serve".

Those are our customers, our employees and our investors.

We do a great job of keeping our customers happy with the highest satisfaction ratings in the business.
Our investors love us right now (have you seen our results?)
But what about our employees?

I'm pleased to tell everyone that we have just been voted one of the Best Places to Work in the San Francisco Bay Area. We came in #12 in total, across thousands of eligible companies - truly an amazing achievement.

Thanks to everyone that participated in this award, and for all those individuals that are currently working for a competitor of ours....if you're good enough and you're customer focused enough, then we're recruiting.

Just finished up the sales and tech training for the US - great energy and confidence throughout.

We're having a good April so far, quite a few new customers and new contracts.

Integration work has started between pieces of Indicative and NimBUS - we're hoping to get the first pieces into customer hands this quarter - probably looking at GA in July, but it's one of those things that we don't know exactly until we get into the work in depth.

On the road again, visiting with a couple of big customers tomorrow and then back home Los Gatos for Friday night cocktails - can't wait!

In Europe this week for sales and technical training.

It's amazing to feel the energy in the room - the sales team are buzzing - we are beating competitors on a regular basis, they are excited about the Indicative acquisition and ready to take on the world. Stories coming out of some of our competitors is that they are struggling and we're getting many of their sales execs approaching us for positions.

Looks like we will be announcing 69% growth in Q1 2008 versus Q1 2007, and 27 brand new name customers - and that's before adding Indicative.

Tremendous momentum - all built on delivering incredible value to our customers.

We've had tons of press coverage today from the announced merging of Indicative and Nimsoft. All of it positive, everyone loving what we're doing "It's about time someone stood up to the big guys".

One comment that I found particularly amusing was

“Nimsoft’s positioning of itself as a smaller company that can somehow uniquely take on the biggest jobs or the ‘big boys’ in the field; well, it’s amusing, and it’s good to see they have big aspirations,” XXXXX said. “And we do see smaller firms able to displace bigger ones in selected situations. But Nimsoft versus the ‘Big Four’ is, shall we say, quite the stretch.”

Not sure that I need to respond to this apart from to say, just wait and see. I understand your skepticsicm - after all, who wouldn't be? Did anyone believe that Salesforce (David) would disrupt Siebel (Goliath?). Anyhow, we will prove this in the same way that we have always done which is with customer wins.

I am reminded of a quote from Mohandas Gandhi...

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

Has the laughing stopped yet?

Well, the marketing people got me. They said that I wasn't allowed to talk about this until today - this time I had to listen to them.

Anyhow, today, Nimsoft is announcing that it is acquiring Indicative Software of Ft Collins, Colorado.

This will turn out to be an extremely important development in the Performance and Availability Monitoring market. Why is that?

Simply because nobody, and I mean nobody, is mounting a meaningful challenge against the cost and complexity of the large incumbents. Sure...their are plenty of point solutions out there but how many companies can truly say that they address all of the disciplines of performance and availability monitoring, can do so in a heterogenous environment and with the scalability and reliability demanded by some of the largest IT environments in the world as well as being simple enough for small and medium sized environments.

Leading analysts define the disciplines that make up Performance and Availability Monitoring as:

Network Monitoring
Server Monitoring
Database Monitoring
Application Monitoring
End User Response Time Monitoring
Service Level Monitoring
Business Service Management

Nimsoft already covered most of these extremely well, but there are two major areas being added with the Indicative products. First - "passive" end user response time monitoring. Not just the ability to issue synthetic transactions but also the ability to watch the "real" traffic from real users and measure the response time of that. I'll blog another time about when to use passive and when to use active/synthetic - but they are for solving different issues and we will be able to offer both.

The second area is Business Service Management. We decided that the big guys had had this space to themselves for too long and they needed someone to shake it up a little by providing easily implemented and easily managed products with a low cost of ownership. We intend to make Business Service Management "within reach" just as we have done with the other disciplines.

This deal is a huge win for both Nimsoft and Indicative customers. We will continue to support and develop both products and all customers will benefit from our ability to re-use technology from one product in the other (e.g. the Best in Class agent-based data collectors that NimBUS has that we will look to make available to Indicative customers to compliment the existing agent-less capabilities).

Anyhow, today I will be speaking to all our customers and we will be hosting a welcome reception for the former Indicative employees. I am looking forward to both events.

Oh, and before you ask, yes, almost every Indicative employee will be joining Nimsoft. A couple of people won't but pretty much everyone else will.....we are really looking forward to fighting the good fight together.

Remember....some companies promise....we deliver!

I couldn't tell you that we have had yet another amazing quarterly performance. We booked more business today than at any point in our history with many, many deals both with existing customers and new ones.

We did quite a few replacements as well with I believe NetIQ gaining the starring role this quarter as the most replaced product - they are fighting for that crown with HP.

Managed Service business was very strong with multiple new MSPs making commitments to Nimsoft - I don't have the numbers yet but I suspect the MSP business will have grown as a percentage of our overall revenue. We're not seeing any economic weakness yet....

And finally, last but not least, I am so happy because tomorrow we welcome on board our brand new VP Marketing who has joined us from another company in this space (I would say competitor but really we don't compete with them much).

Brian....welcome.....as you know, you're on your own for the first few days as I take a few days rest in Mexico before we continue redefining the Availability and Performance monitoring space with our upcoming announcements on April 8th.

Margarita time?

Yes...it's the last day of the quarter today. We have a lot of business that will happen today - it's great but it's stressful - who ever invented quarterly based reporting?

We are also counting down to our announcement....8 days left.....I hope all the marketing people are ready (I know they are really).

An interesting week last week. BMC putting their hands in their pockets to the tune of $800m to acquire Bladelogic. Kind of a shame really because I thought that Bladelogic were competing very effectively with HP/Opsware and it looked like they could stay independent and grow. One silver lining for me is that I owned stock in Bladelogic so at least that was good.

By the way, I don't consider myself a stock tipping expert at all, but I have done OK by buying stock in systems management companies that I believe are destined to be acquired. The latest one that I *may* buy would be Quest Software.....if their CEO continues with his SEC problems and is forced to leave the company, I would suspect that they would sell the business, much like what happened to Mercury Interactive a while back.

Anyhow, the other item that happened last week was SolarWinds filed to go public. Their business model is just incredible - they spend a really low amount on any R&D activities and sales activities and as such, make a huge profit. Really in the "stack it high and sell it cheap" business - and they do a very good job of executing. Watch for that IPO, it's going to get a very large market value.

1 more week in the quarter and lots more business for us to do. It's that time again....

Wanted to wish anyone that reads this blog and that celebrates Easter, a happy one.

Unfortunately a sad one for myself as I found out that a dear friend of mine that was a truly amazing individual has passed away.

My thoughts are with his family.

Gary

I'm really feeling flattered this last week.

First Joe Panettieri at MSPmentor compliments this blog. Check it out here

Then, it also got picked up by Ryan Shopp at IT Knowledge Exchange here

Kind of amazing because I really have no idea what blogs are meant to be. I've never read a book on it and this blog is purely my thoughts. I talk about Nimsoft because I'm excited about what we are doing and passionate about this space but Joe has it spot on; it's not controlled by marketing (sometimes they get frustrated with me talking about news before they officially release it) or anyone else. Sometimes being the CEO has its benefits.

But, I do notice that pretty much anyone that interviews with us has read the blog. I hope it gives people a good sense for who I am, who Nimsoft is and the culture of the company.

Time to go...

PS I was on a plane yesterday, got the MacBook Air out to do some work, and the lady next to me oohed and ahhed. Turns out that she worked for Apple but had never seen an Air close up. Is this really a laptop that I'm talking about.

We have some huge news cooking. It's news that our employees and customers and partners will love, but unfortunately news that our competitors will hate. But that brings up the question of who are Nimsoft's competitors?

We think of the market as having 4 tiers...

1st - the Big Four (BMC, HP, IBM, CA) - they actually capture about 65% of all the spend in the performance and availability monitoring space. Probably should add Microsoft into this tier - not a very broad soution but they've got the scale. Does size matter?

2nd - The Challengers. Companies that are established and successful - knocking on the door of the big four.

3rd - Point solutions - there are tons of them. Most of them take an open source tool, wrap some code around it and call themselves a software company.

4th - Open source itself - an important part of the market, but not one that we think that large companies will bet their infrastructure on.

So...who do we compete with? Well, in most cases we are competing with the Big Four. Nimsoft is well and truly in the Challenger tier, and probably joined in that tier by companies like NetIQ (Attachmate), Smarts (EMC), Quest but almost nobody else. Most other providers are in the Point solution category and I expect the majority of those companies to fail within the next few years. I recently heard that Groundworks had some pretty major layoffs....true or not?

We're in to our quarter end at the moment, but this year we have Easter to contend with as well. Clearly the Easter Bunny does not have a quarterly quota to meet :)

Yep....NimBUS 3.5 is officially shipping....lots of new stuff in there for customers.

Also....did you see our VIrtualization updates last week? Good press coverage as we extend our market leadership position in the monitoring of VMWare and other virtualized environments.

More new stuff in the queue - we cannot get it out of the door fast enough and....

Major announcements coming in April....very exciting...watch this space..

Yesterday, I flew on the red-eye to the East Coast, got changed in the bathrooms at the airport and then got into a long taxi ride, all to visit with one prospective customer. The customer opened the meeting by asking us "Why have you flown all the way here to see me?"

It was actually the first time I had been asked that question in such a direct manner but to me, the answer was obvious.....because we want to win your business and we are committed to our customers. Doesn't everyone do that? And then it became clear....no, everyone does not do that. No, the CEO of most companies would not do that and no, most companies do not have the commitment to customer success that Nimsoft has.

The rest of the meeting went very well and now we have to prove to this company that we can do what we say we can do. Meanwhile, my journey home was an absolute nightmare travel-wise (oh how I wish for simpler air travel) but I was happy knowing that my time was very well spent.

Yes, I LOVE my Macbook air. First day in the office with it yesterday and plenty of oohs and aahs from everyone that saw it. I have it running VMWare Fusion, with XP, Office and am using the Mac apps simultaneously with the Windows apps - works like a dream and Windows hasn't crashed once (better than running native on the thinkpad so far). Now...if only could get rid of office.......dream........

Anyhow, something is definitely in the air at Nimsoft....unfortunately I cannot reveal details yet but coming soon are a couple of major announcements - probably in the next 6 weeks or so. Our customers will love what we are doing and the industry will take notice. We are gradually, one customer at a time changing this business with happy customers.

By the way, I had a customer email me yesterday saying they were having some problems - the first line of their email was "sorry to bother you with this". Are you kidding me? If any of our customers is not happy with our support, service and product then I want to know about it and we will resolve it immediately. It's not a bother - it's my passion.

Our support director and SE director have already spoken to this customer and, by the time that I go back for an update next week, I expect them to be very satisfied.

People don't believe us.....but we are serious about this stuff.

First...I bought a MacBook Air today (writing this on it). It's cool....I'm a sucker for cool. Loving it so far

Second, very happy to be on the vendor advisory board of the MSPAlliance. We first joined the MSPAlliance when they had about 20 members and we were 2 person company in the US. Now they have over 5,000 members.

But, what I really like about the MSPAlliance is that they are independent.

Has anyone seen the marketing that the other organization...MSPPartners are doing? Well, MSPPartners is owned by Level Platforms, one of the low end vendors in this space. They claim to be independent but meanwhile are owned and operated by a vendor....hmm...questionable?

Nimsoft Revenues Continue Meteoric Rise in Q4 and FY 2007

139 brand new name customers, $29.4m in bookings, 77 percent increase in GAAP revenues and a 131 percent growth in subscription revenue highlight stunning 2007 performance

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – January 23, 2008 – Nimsoft, Inc., the “Big 4” alternative for IT performance and availability monitoring solutions, today announced that the company smashed its business expectations for 2007. Total bookings for the year reached a record $29.4 million and Q4 2007 achieved a new company record at nearly $11 million. Overall, GAAP revenue grew by 77 percent for the year and deferred revenue stood at more than $16 million at the end of 2007. The company added 139 brand new name customers during 2007, bringing the total customer count to 533 in 26 countries. Customers include some of the leading companies in the world, such as Amway Corporation, Barclays Capital, Ladbrokes PLC and T-Systems, together with leading managed service providers, such as CDW Berbee, FusionStorm, Getronics, Novell, Rackspace Managed Hosting and Ramesys, and a large number of medium enterprise organizations such as DeKalb Medical, Foley & Lardner, Liberty Savings Bank and New Enterprise Associates.

Nimsoft President and CEO Gary Read said, “These results clearly demonstrate the amount of pent-up demand in the market for an enterprise management solution that delivers immediate and lasting value. Our customer satisfaction ratings are without parallel, and, every month more and more customers are turning to Nimsoft to replace incumbent and complex products from the large vendors such as BMC Software, CA, HP and IBM. We will continue to deliver solutions that are easy to implement and easy to administer, and yet are sophisticated enough and scalable enough to meet the technical and business requirements of some of the largest companies in the world. Nimsoft is particularly proud of its record of customer satisfaction as evidenced by the maintenance renewal rate of nearly 100 percent and surveys of its entire customer base showing greater than 99 percent of customers are satisfied with the solution and the company.”

Other highlights for the year included:

• Secured $10.3 million in venture capital financing with JMI Equity and NorthzoneVentures; the company’s only round of external investment.
• Recognized by Inc. magazine as one of the Top 50 Fastest Growing Software Companies.
• Ranked by Information Week as excellent for its "performance, scalability, and stellar affordability" as an application performance management solution.
• Won against or replaced "Big 4" monitoring solutions in at least 60 deals in the past 18 months.
• Led the marketplace by delivering next-generation dashboards using Rich Internet Application technology to deliver dynamic, 360-degree views of their entire infrastructure.
• Was one of the first companies to offer comprehensive monitoring and reporting for virtualized infrastructure. Approximately 80 customers are already using Nimsoft to monitor their VMware environment.
• Introduced "No Touch" NimBUS, which delivers on the Nimsoft vision of offering a completely zero administration SLM solution.
• Continuously broadened and enhanced the Nimsoft solution with support for more than 100 different technologies in addition to increasing the product’s scalability.
• Sponsored a Best Practices for Managed Service Providers awards program. Winners were Alvaka Networks, CDW Berbee, Getronics, InCompass IT, SL Powers and Eurodata Systems.
• Nearly 100 Nimsoft customers attended the company’s annual conference held in the United States, making it Nimsoft’s largest and most successful ever.

About Nimsoft
Nimsoft is the premier provider of business-focused IT infrastructure monitoring solutions that customers can easily deploy and use. The company’s monitoring solution, NimBUS, is used by hundreds of companies across diverse industries to manage complex networked systems to meet service level agreement targets. Nimsoft solutions combine performance and availability monitoring, advanced SLM functionality and broad platform coverage for unprecedented ease of implementation, deployment and use.

Symantec have become the latest company to realize that selling monitoring/management solutions can be tough. They have decided to jettison their "Precise" product portfolio into the hands of a Private Equity firm.

I continue to believe that in order to be truly successful in this market, then a company needs unwavering executive commitment and a razor sharp focus. It's true, that if you are large enough vendor then some customers will always purchase your products as part of a strategic relationship, but, if you want to be truly successful, then you've got to keep some focus.

We have multiple companies approaching us at the moment looking to sell themselves. Most of the time their products are great but they have not managed to make the sales model work. We are passionate about our business and the impact that our products have on our customers.


Symantec to Sell Application Performance Management Business to Vector Capital
Thursday January 17, 4:05 pm ET

Vector Capital to Invest Significantly in Customer Support, Technology Development, and Sales and Marketing of APM Solutions

CUPERTINO, CA--(MARKET WIRE)--Jan 17, 2008 -- Symantec Corp. (NasdaqGS:SYMC - News) today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to sell its Application Performance Management (APM) business to Vector Capital, a San Francisco-based private equity firm specializing in spinouts, buyouts and recapitalizations of established technology businesses. Upon closing, the APM business will operate as a new, stand-alone company called Precise Software Solutions Inc. The transaction, which is subject to certain customary conditions, it expected to close by the end of the first calendar quarter of 2008.

Sun acquires MySQL for $1bn
Oracle acquires BEA for $8.5bn

and...the following write up appeared in The451 - an industry analyst (and we haven't even published our results yet!)

Nimsoft keeps momentum going, releases new management portal

Analyst: Dennis Callaghan
Sector: Enterprise Software »»
Date: 15 Jan 2008
Email This Report: to colleagues »» / to yourself »»
451 Report Folder: File report »» View my folder »»

Event summary

Nimsoft continued on its rapid growth trajectory in 2007, adding about 130 net new customers to pass the 500-customer mark. The company was on pace for $23-25m in revenue for the year.
Nimsoft has upgraded its management console, known as the Enterprise Console 2.0, with richer, more interactive dashboards. It built this version entirely in Macromedia Flex, eliminating the need for an ActiveX or Java Runtime.
About 130 of Nimsoft's customers are managed service providers. The company, though still strongest in the midmarket, continues to position itself as a lower-cost service-level monitoring replacement or alternative for large enterprises.
The 451 take

Nimsoft wrote another chapter in its success story in 2007. The company continues to be strong in the midmarket while winning more enterprise deals and reaching still more companies through an expanding MSP channel. Its latest software upgrade is mainly around ease of use and presentation, but does help make Nimsoft's software more credible and attractive for larger enterprises. Nimsoft appears to be holding its own so far as it moves up-market, but we expect it will continue to face more intense and fragmented competition as this segment of its business matures.

Details

Nimsoft enjoyed more growth in 2007 and continues to make waves in the service-level management software space. The company added about 130 new customers last year, pushing it over the 500 mark. It hasn't yet computed final 2007 revenue, but was on pace to land somewhere between $23-25m. That compares to 375 customers and $16m in revenue in 2006, when it added about 120 new customers. About half its customers are in the US, and more than 40 vertical industries are represented in its customer base.

Nimsoft has positioned itself as a lower-cost alternative to the 'Big Four' IT management vendors – IBM, HP, BMC Software and CA Inc – and taken this message to the midmarket. It continues to have success with this approach and now claims about 130 managed service providers as customers. But it has been gradually moving up-market for a while now and claims to have won against or replaced the Big Four on at least 50 deals since the middle of 2006. The company now reports an average deal size (ADS) of about $100,000, about double its ADS of 18 months ago. Its entry price remains around $20,000, however, and it continues to undercut much of its competition on pricing. Nimsoft's latest software upgrade is a new management console, delivered via an online portal built entirely in Macromedia Flex. This results in more interactive, multi-dimensional dashboards that are easier to create.

Competitive landscape

Nimsoft sees the Big Four as its main competition. It does acknowledge hearing more about Indicative Software, a company that is similarly taking on the Big Four in service-level management, but believes it can still beat Indicative on entry pricing. We think Indicative is still generally selling into larger organizations than Nimsoft, but as Nimsoft wins larger deals, the two should see more of each other. Microsoft Operations Manager and Quest Software are competitors to Nimsoft we've cited before.

SLM software vendors like Digital Fuel, Oblicore and Managed Objects may be mindshare competitors to Nimsoft in the initial stages of deals, but none of these companies really has the same positioning or the midmarket presence of Nimsoft, and Nimsoft claims to almost never see them competitively. Likewise, SolarWinds is strong in network performance monitoring, but not really a direct competitor, though SolarWinds has similarly had a lot of success in the MSP channel. Nimsoft defines its niche as more 'IT operations monitoring.' While it does have some transaction monitoring capabilities in its arsenal, it has yet to see any transaction management vendors like OpTier, dynaTrace Software, Correlix and Correlsense on deals. One company that should challenge Nimsoft in the midmarket is Akorri, which offers agentless IT performance monitoring via an appliance.

Did you know that we now have 533 customers in 29 separate countries.

And, we have approximately 60 customers using NimBUS to manage their virtual infrastructures.

And none of those numbers include customers of our managed service provider partners that are using NimBUS which would run into thousands and thousands.

Good stuff.

What an amazing 2007, and an amazing Q4 to finish the year for Nimsoft.

Yet again we had a record breaking quarter with revenue reaching all time highs, the number of new customers also being a record and customer satisfaction remaining unmatched.

For the year 2007, we have firmly established ourselves as the only viable alternative to the big-four....our new bookings have reached the $25m level, our customer base has surpassed 500 and we are regularly replacing so called competitive offerings.

More soon, but just wanted to thank all of our customers, employees and partners for making this a wonderful 2007 for Nimsoft and I am looking forward to an incredible 2008.

Gary

Last week, Gartner published a new Magic Quadrant for the Event Correlation and Analysis market. Some great things to say about Nimsoft, but....because I'm not allowed to quote them I'll have to just tell you my interpretation of what they said until you can get your own full copy of the research.

Nimsoft is a real alternative to the big-4

Nimsoft has shown large increases in number of customers over the last 2 years

Customers say that NimBUS is easy to install/use and has excellent ROI

Nimsoft is an innovator - particularly in the area of managing virtualized environments

I urge you to get a full copy of the research if you are a Gartner subscriber; if not then I believe we are negotiating for reprints.

Sorry I haven't blogged for a while - I'll be sure to have a New Year's resolution to keep things updated.

At our recent User Conference here in the Bay Area, we gave our customers some written survey questions to answer. I have edited out their names, but can assure you that everything else below is exactly what they wrote. I have not added, deleted or edited a single comment. Makes interesting reading...

What were your worst experiences with previous monitoring tools?

• Support, deployment, complexity, cost
• Being sold a product (CA Unicenter) that after several years was never successfully implemented
• The total time it takes to manage after it is completed from the IT manager’s point of view
• Dealing with time stamps or session IDs in Mercury’s BPM (Business Process Monitor) which is Mercury’s end to end monitor

Why would you NOT buy a monitoring product from the "big-4"?
• Deployment time
• Complexity
• Cost (initial and TCO)
• Ease of Use
• Customization
• Conspiracy
• Lengthy and complicated setup
• Not end user friendly
• Wait time and responsiveness of the product
• Lack of features
• Administration time and costs are high
• HP/Mercury licenses E2E by the step and by application, making it VERY expensive

Why did you leave the Big 4 ?
• Ease of Use
• Cost
• Complexity
• Deployment time
• Administration
• Lease expiration
• On a whim
• We were able to purchase NimBUS for less than the cost of annual maintenance for CA Unicenter
• Did not monitor everything we wanted
• It provided too many false positives and not the correct information
• Our old monitoring system was a nightmare to configure. The alarms were overwhelming and in a lot of cases false

Why did you select NimBUS?
• Because of small footprint. Very flexible. Separation of monitoring and alerting. XXX company recommended you.
• We went from a 6-person support/admin team to 2 people to implement NimBUS to 1 person to maintain and support the NimBUS implementation
• Costs, support, ease of use and deployment
• Ease of use, cost, all-in-one solution. Can incorporate custom probes into tool
• Cost, less complexity, decreased deployment time
• Cost effectiveness and it has the bells and whistles that meet my needs
• Cost, ease of setup, ease of user interface
• Research showed it to be superior
• Easier, more cost effective.
• The company is based on what the customer wants not on what the company wants to do just to make a buck
• Distributed monitoring, ease of use, SIR reports. Features and scalability

Those folks over at High Price seem to be waking up to the fact that customers are preferring our products. While they continue on their "if it moves, buy it" strategy of protecting and growing market share, they are leaving the requirements of most of their customers behind. After suffering 3 major losses at F500 type customers to Nimsoft in the past couple of months (replacing the incumbent High Price products), their sales force appears to be getting a little worried.

Last week was their worldwide sales conference....

the presenter put up a slide....

"Top companies to be concerned about (up and comers)"....

Guess who was top of the list?

Sure that everyone saw the announcement this week that Oracle will start shipping its own virtualization platform and will start delivering its products using the virtual appliance method. What does this mean for customers and why is Oracle doing it?

Well, first what it means for customers is that the world of heterogeous virtualization hypervisors is well and truly here. While customers may try to standardize on only one, liklihood is, just as with UNIX, Linux etc before, that they will end up with multiple different flavors runnning alongside each other. This is good for Nimsoft because our position is that we will support all mainstream versions of virtualization (just like we do with other layers in the infrastructure).

But why would Oracle do this? Well, apart from jumping on to the Virtualization hype, and clearly making some money in the process (don't you love it when vendors tell you their products are free but you sign an annual support charge), what about the possible implications on support.

e.g. Could we ever see a future when Oracle only delivers its applications on its own "certified stack"? Oracle virtualization, Oracle Linux, Oracle database, Oracle application.....

Think about going to the Dell web site, entering that you want to buy Siebel for 100 users and getting a price that includes everything required to run it, h/w, o/s, db, app....all pre-configured. Take it out of the box, plug it in and done (well almost, because you'd still spend the next 6 months trying to customize Siebel for your needs).

The advantage for customers is clear, no more finger pointing between the OS vendor and the application vendor, but also, the advantage for Oracle would huge. No more having to develop and QA products on multiple flavors of OS (this is a HUGE cost to a software company) and maybe no more having to provide support for all the different combinations (another huge cost for software companies).

Wow....customers win with better support, Oracle wins with revenue increase and huge cost reduction, Nimsoft wins with heterogeneous virtualized environments - seems pretty cool to me.

Took the kiddies trick or treating this week (Cryptmaster and Pirate) although I didn't personally dress up. My girlfriend suggested that we should be Posh and Becks (she's obsessed with London).....but then again, in the recent company sales event they portayed me as Darth Vader. Not sure which one is closer to the real me.

From a business perspective, we announced our Q3 results this week which are simply incredible and Q4 has started really well also with multiple new customers coming on board. (I'm so glad we're not publicly traded otherwise I couldn't say those things).

We are in the midst of announcing the new version of the NimBUS server, which has taken scalability to a new level. I don't think there is a single environment in the world that we cannot scale to now. Also added tons more stuff in there - advanced correlation, auto-discovery, auto-configuration and also the first version of our brand new, state of the art, gorgeous and sexy user interface. More later on this one (geez the marketing team is already going to moan at me later today for letting the cat out of the bag).

As an aside, it really makes me laugh seeing some of the "pretenders" in our space that have taken Open Source projects and packaged them up and think that they can deliver an enterprise class solution. Oh well, we'll just wait and see - someone needs to explain to them the concept of "you don't know what you don't know" - the wall is there guys, you just won't be able to see it until you hit it.

I'm very excited that we are having our North American User Conference next week - I heard that we are having to book surrounding hotels as the registration has been far higher than expected. We've got some good keynote speakers including someone talking about GreenIT - seems to be finding its way up the CIO agenda these days. Nothing I enjoy more than spending time with our customers so it's an exicting week for me next week.

I want to talk about so much more right now, the EMC acquisition of Voyence, the Bladelogic IPO, the BMC acquisition of Emprisa Networks.....

The fight is well and truly on between the big four. It's really interesting to watch as these guys continue to acquire to build out their portfolios....they are all trying to capture the big, big contracts from customers to be the "soup to nuts" providers. Meanwhile, customers continue to walk away from them in droves because, as a leading analyst mentioned to me this week, "the difference between the marketing message and the product capabilities of the big four is so large that it could be referred to as the Grand Canyon".

What will EMC do I wonder? If they are serious then they need to buy their way in....BMC, Bladelogic?

Oracle are remarkably quiet right now.....and we all know that they are not standing still so I'm sure we'll see news from our friends across the lagoon some time soon.

And what about Microsoft....but then again, they probably need everything that they've got to go to battle with Google.

Anyhow, all this is good news for Nimsoft - we continue to focus on what our customers tell us that they need - solutions that deliver value and do it with the minimum of fuss. Our customer satisfaction continues to be unparalleled because quite simply, we do what we say we will do.

Would love to hear from customers on what they think future issues will be - you can always email me directly on garyread@nimsoft.com.

Excellent product review in Network Computing today. Take a look here...

In Spain at the moment for our worldwide meeting; we are announcing and training our sales and technical teams on a number of new products that we will announce publicly towards the end of October.

We completed another record quarter for Nimsoft - more than doubling our bookings from Q3 last year (actually about 130% growth) - wow!

We signed 37 brand new name customers including some major names and replacements of products from Computer Associates, HP and others.

Also, pleased to welcome Tim Bisley our new VP EMEA. Tim joins us from HP Software where he ran the field organization for EMEA. Prior to HP, Tim spent the prior 7 years at Mercury Interactive as a senior executive in Europe.

The new products are very very exciting - our customers are going to love the enhancements and additional value that we've added in to the latest version of NimBUS. We are also releasing support for several new application environments and some brand new products as well.

Time for me to go back to work - currently the sales team are learning about updated subscription based pricing that we have.

Nimsoft will announce a new VP of EMEA at the start of October. Unfortunately I cannot reveal who this is just yet as they are still under contract with their current employer but I can tell you that I am just so excited. We have attracted what I consider to be an absolute rock star that will compliment our existing VP Sales in the US (Ed Sterbenc) very well. Comes from a big-four competitor and excited to be a huge part of the continuing Nimsoft success story.

Hope you've seen the press release about our astounding growth reported by Inc. Magazine - 500 percent growth in 3 years...not bad...but this is just the start. We are THE company to watch in this space.

Already September is lining up to be an incredible month for us. We have over 200 transactions that we are currently tracking that have a chance to close in September but most importantly, the product continues to advance at an incredible rate and our customer satisfaction remains the envy of the industry.

The product announcements that are coming in a couple of months will set a new standard for every competitor to aspire to.

Sorry if this blog sounds like a glorified marketing message but I am so buzzed by what is going on. We continue to prove that a quality product that delivers on its promises coupled with unrivalled customer satisfaction and a customer friendly pricing methodology will win.

For anyone that is interested....the minute we left England it started raining. I'll be going back over soon so hopefully I'll take some California sunshine with me again.

What's been happening in my worlds? So much that I lose track.

First, I'm exicted that Nimsoft that has just been announced by Inc. magazine as the 49th fastest growing software company in the US. Very proud of this achievement for the incredible team that we have but....I think everyone will be amazed at what will happen over the next few years.

Second, we continue to get great customer traction. Many new customers signed up in the last couple of months and we are about to start the "last month of the quarter" when the action really heats up (and my home life really suffers). Big name companies as well as medium businesses - everyone loves Nimsoft.

Third, it was my kids birthday a couple of weeks ago (Roller Blades and Wii games in case you wanted to know) and they start back at school next week (2nd grade - time flies).

Fourth, having work done on my house right now - looks good but getting fed up with contractors everywhere.

And finally, we are moving close to launching some major new initiatives for the company around areas that are going to pretty key for future IT infrastructures. Very exciting, lots of work for everyone around here but customers are going to really enjoy what we are doing.

More soon...

In England again and guess what? It hasn't stopped being sunny and warm since I arrived. London in the sunshine is amazing.

I'm sure everyone knows about the HP acquisition of Opsware by now - huge price. Interesting quote from the head of HP Software the other day...

“There are companies who have pieces of the puzzle.We believe we are the leading and arguably the only company who has assembled all the necessary pieces. We want to link different pieces of puzzle to provide a coordinated holistic view. This separates us from dozens of other competitors cobbling together parts.”

As the French would say, Vive la Difference (special prize to anyone that can tell me the difference between "assembling the pieces from multiple acquisitions and linking them together" and "cobbling together parts").

Our PR people are probably going to complain to me again for leaking news, but I'm excited at the things going on in Nimsoft right now.

Over the last 3 months, we have hired a new leader for our team of Territory Development Reps and we have hired 5 new Corporate Account Reps into the team in California (we will be looking for office space again soon).

Next week, we have a new leader of our Corporate Account Reps joining us and.....

On Tuesday, we have a brand new VP Marketing joining us as well. We are just opening a small office in Chicago to add to our Corporate HQ in Redwood Shores and office in New York.

The 451 group issued an updated report on Nimsoft last week discussing our latest product for VMWare Service Level Management. An extract....

This and its recent support for clustered Exchange environments show Nimsoft's interest in winning larger enterprise deals. Though its success has been mostly in the midmarket and the managed service provider (MSP) space to date, this is a company that has yet to have a problem with execution.

I am so pleased that someone recognizes what we are achieving. Nimsoft is growing very rapidly, adding people, customers, products etc and yet we continue to drive this business with excellent execution. All down to the quality of our employees and their passion and belief in what we are doing.

We responded to the Silverback acquisition by Dell by offering Silverback MSP partners a safe haven and a cost free migration to NimBUS. In addition, we will be making a charitable donation to the World Wildlife Fund to help protect the real Silverback Gorillas for every Silverback MSP that migrates to NimBUS. Thanks to eWeek for this great write up

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2160739,00.asp

Nimsoft Offers to 'Save the Silverback'

By Jessica Davis
July 19, 2007

Nimsoft, a self-described service level management platform provider, is painting itself as the white knight for managed service providers distressed by Dell's acquisition of platform provider SilverBack Technologies.

The company, based in Redwood City, Calif., is offering to save SilverBack MSPs by offering them the same level of managed services at the same price they received from SilverBack—and the company will do the entire conversion for free.

"In real life, the SilverBack is actually a male gorilla, which is an endangered species," said Gary Read, CEO of Nimsoft. "We think the SilverBack MSP is about to become an endangered species as well, so we are launching a Save the SilverBack MSP program."

Read is offering Nimsoft's own staff to do any conversion work for MSPs and their customers from SilverBack to Nimsoft. Typically that will include a trip out to any MSP that takes the company up on its offer.

Once the conversion occurs and customers are up and running—for the same price as they paid to SilverBack—they will always have the option of upgrading to a higher level of service from Nimsoft.

"SilverBack offers up-down type monitoring," Read said. "That is truly a commodity. The higher value is monitoring of applications and services that make up those applications. No one cares whether the server is up or down. They care what effect that has on their business application."

Read said the offer will run through the end of the year. At that point, Nimsoft will evaluate whether or not to renew it.

"SilverBack MSPs are waking up to the news of the Dell acquisition today and they will be getting together in the next few weeks and months to decide where to take their businesses," Read said. "The people who want to offer higher value services will probably decide that by the end of the year."

Nimsoft can offer those MSPs comparable services to what they are receiving today at the same price, and then "they can use the additional functionality available from Nimsoft to sell higher value services to customers and protect their businesses from commoditization."

And while Read would not guarantee that his company was immune to being acquired, he said Nimsoft was more likely to purchase other companies than be acquired itself.

The privately-held company expects $21 million in revenues this year and is growing at a 60 percent to 70 percent rate. It is profitable and has about 450 customers, most of them enterprise customers. About 150 of its customers are MSPs.

Read would not comment on whether he'd also been approached by Dell as an acquisition target.

"On the surface the SilverBack acquisition makes a lot of sense for Dell," Read said. "The interesting thing is going to be how Dell manages to scale this business. They can either sign up thousands if not tens of thousands of channel partners. Or they can take this through their direct model."

Email received today from the CEO of an MSP that has been a customer of Nimsoft for about 18 months...

Gary,

I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn. We are loving our Nimbus here at XXX and we are thrilled about the decision we made.

-Scott

Having slept on this for a night, it seems as this acquisition can be nothing but bad news for Silverback's MSP partners. Let's imagine the possible scenarios for a minute and see where this could be going.

First, we need to understand that Silverback's current revenues do not move the needle for Dell. If Dell are going to get serious about managed services, then they will need to turn this into a business that generates hundreds or thousands of times the revenues of today. How can they do that?

Are they interested in the MSP partner that is currently giving Silverback say $5,000 a month? Hmm, if they are going to remain interested in that type of partner, then they are going to have to scale to thousands or tens of thousands of them. Do I expect that to happen from a company that has traditionally been the "anti-channel"? Absolutely not. Even with the best intentions, it will take Dell forever to be able to understand and build an internal organization capable of supporting that and repair their reputation with the channel.

So, what's the alternative? The alternative is that Dell uses Silverback through its direct to customer approach and in fact starts to "pre-load" Silverback on to all of the servers etc that Dell sells. "Have a few months of free monitoring and then pay us $50 a month to continue...". Seems that this is a much more likely scenario, Dell knows how to scale a massive direct organization

Dell deals in commodities and likely they will try and commoditize the delivery of remote Managed Services. This is horrible news for many MSPs, particularly those using lower end platforms such as Silverback, N-Able, Level Platforms or Kaseya.

MSPs need to avoid commoditization and in order to do so need to move up the stack and offer more value added services to their customers. Beyond basic up/down monitoring but more application monitoring and Service Level Monitoring. The good ones have already figured this out.

The rest.....well, good luck in competing for commodity business against Dell.

Today, Nimsoft has one less "competitor". Silverback Technologies that have been around for what seems like forever and yet have failed to make any meaningful market impact in the MSP space, announced that they were being acquired by Dell.

The acquisition underscores the growing importance that major vendors are placing on the Managed Services space in which Nimsoft has an ever growing base of leading MSP partners.

Nimsoft will announce our Q2 results next week and they are amazing!!!!



Dell To Buy MSP Platform Vendor SilverBack

By Staff, CRN
5:01 PM EDT Wed. Jul. 18, 2007

PC maker Dell said Wednesday it had reached a deal to buy MSP platform vendor SilverBack Technologies, throwing itself into the managed service provider market as it seeks to expand its remote service and management lineup.

Round Rock, Texas-based Dell said it "plans to leverage SilverBack Technologies, Inc. into its operations as part of its ongoing strategy of IT simplification." The deal comes little more than a week after Dell Chairman and CEO Michael Dell told reporters that acquisitions would be an ongoing part of the company's turnaround strategy -- a turnaround he said at the time was still not finished.

SilverBack, based in Billerica, Mass., saw itself become a major player in the channel over the past two years by aggressively slashing pricing for its remote IT monitoring and management technology to VARs. It cut prices at a time when a growing number were entering the MSP segment.

Reached by phone, Silverback CEO Dan Phillips would not go into specifics when asked about the impact of the acquisition on the MSP platform vendor's channel partners.

"I can't answer that. I can say that it's a very positive impact on the company and on the channel," Phillips said. "We're doing very well. We're extremely pleased with the situation."

Several MSPs contacted by ChannelWeb were surprised by the move.

"My emotions are all over place, but my gut is it's a good move," said Bill Hood, president of Network Partners, a Dallas-based MSP, who heard the news from a reporter. Network Partners uses Silverback's platform to provide managed services to customers and is also a longtime Dell partner, Hood said.

"Dell has the chance to take this product big time. If we can ride on those coattails, that's good," Hood said. "My only concern is that they'll want to sell it to the masses. Silverback is not shrinkwrapped stuff you can sell on Dell.com."

Russ Bryant, vice president of manged services at Datotel, a St. Louis-based MSP, said he had concerns about the Dell deal. "Anytime there's change you have some concerns, but I don't think this will be anything but good," Bryant said. "It allows SilverBack to stay ahead of the pack. It means lots of R&D and an expansion of their base. I think Dell will help them will all their things."

Bryant added that his concerns don't have anything to do with Dell's direct legacy or the possible commoditization of managed services offerings. "I think that's a little close minded. Dell is big, but it doesn't mean they're bad," bryant said. "They'll take the product to the next step and help separate SilverBack from the people they're competing against. It might allow them to compete against the CAs of the world and some other people like that."

Still, Todd McKendrick, vice president of sales at Do IT Smarter, said he hopes that things will stay the same. Do IT Smarter uses the Silverback platform to offer smaller VARs a hosted managed services offering they can resell to their customers.

"We've had no indication things would change from the executive team at Silverback," McKendrick said. "Silverback has always been about true partnership, unlike other software partners where they just want to sell you a license. If they can maintain that mantra with Dell, then that's great. Dell may have a different agenda. We'll just have to wait and see how things will fold out." Though details of Dell's buyout of SilverBack were not immediately available, a Dell spokesman said the company is committed to continuing the change from a direct model to selling through solution providers in the channel, and said Dell was still committed to expanding its strategy of providing enhanced, remote support to customers.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

An email received from one of our largest customers the other day. Anyone that reads my blog will know that this kind of email reflects exactly the philosophy of Nimsoft.

Gary –

We are very excited to have Nimsoft as long-term partners. We have very few truly Amazing vendors, and I’m happy to say that Nimsoft is one of them. Your team has been consistently supportive and responsive to our needs, and you and Paul have been superb to work with on this deal. This deal is mutually beneficial to all parties and really sets us up for a long and prosperous future.

Please accept our sincerest thanks.