Over the last couple of days, I have received numerous customer emails with regards to the quality of the Nimsoft team and product. I have removed any reference to company names/employee names etc because these are personal emails to me, but I have to share with everyone because THIS is what our company is about, this is why I started a company in the first place. Delivering incredible customer satisfaction which is sadly so often lacking in others.

I thank these individuals and every individual that takes the time to recognize why Nimsoft is different.

Email #1

I'd like to compliment your team on excellent performance and delivery.... Everyone we have encountered here has gone above and beyond in working with us to overcome the hurdles we needed to in order to get this done. xxx especially has done a great job of keeping his cool through what must have been very challenging and sometimes frustrating circumstances, and focusing on bringing all the right people into play in order to succeed.

I told you when we met that I am looking for a business partner here, not a vendor, and the challenges we have overcome together have helped to confirm for me that Nimsoft is willing and able to be that partner. Looking forward to much success in working together.

Email #2
We are truly excited about our alliance with you and Nimsoft. In our opinion, this partnership is a game changer in the MSP field and we will be leading the way. You, your team and your product coupled with our team and processes will change the face of what is expected from an MSP.

Email #3
This is a very important milestone which signals a very promising era of new business for both companies and the start of a long term fruitful relationship. As you know your product will be one of the most important components of our Business Support System and therefore is absolutely critical for our success. I imagine that xxx will be for Nimsoft a very important customer and even more important reference in the marketplace. Therefore we have all the elements on the table to make out of this relationship an absolute success.
I would also like to remark the very helpful and committed attitude of xxx who helped this milestone to crystallise......thank you very much for your help and flexibility to make this happen.

Why can't everyday be the last day of the quarter?

Such a buzz today....Europe has been bringing in business all day and I've been awake most of the night....12 new pieces of business today so far and we're still working on 5 more. Outside of Q4, which is always our strongest quarter, looks like Europe has set a new record for the region....but we're still going.

The US is starting to come into action now. First deal already won in the US today.....plenty more being worked.

Come on Nimsoft....!

Last couple of days of the quarter next week. We've still got a lot of business to get....some of which we will get, some we will not. Business across so many different verticals....retail, gaming, MSP, Network providers, financial services, energy, healthcare....

Moving in to Q3, we're going to be recruiting for quite a few key positions. UK/Nordic Sales Director (UK), Director of Operations (US), Marketing list/database management in both the UK and the US (probably contract positions), Sales executives (US), Snr Accountant (US), Contract Bookings specialist (US) and possibly a number of others as well...resumes@nimsoft.com if you know anyone.

Also got some really interesting partnerships developing that could add significant value to our customers. I'd expect probably one of these to be finalized and announced in Q3.

And finally, our entire engineering and product mgmt team is working really, really hard right now. There is an incentive in place for the entire team if they meet 100% of their 37 deliverables this quarter. I know that they are really close and suspect that many of them are putting in the hours this weekend to get things finished up....talk about peer pressure....it's an all or nothing incentive across 3 engineering labs.

Talking of which, of those 37 deliverables, 21 of them are product deliverables for products to go in to GA state. It's absolutely amazing what this team are delivering - I don't believe that there is another company in this space that can come close to the talent and deliverables that our engineering team has.

I am hoping to authorize their incentive....keep it up guys....our customers really, really appreciate this.

Unbelievable. Straight off the red-eye, I need to get some sleep and a shower before a HUGE meeting. Go to check in at the Westin New Jersey and they have sold my room.

Despite it being confirmed, reserved, paid for, and they were told I would not arrive until the morning.

But...to rub salt in the wound, the manager spends 10 minutes BSing me that "they didn't know I was going to come in in the morning" - only when I asked them to show me the reservation on their system (because this was confirmed) did they finally admit that they had "extenuating circumstances" the night before and in fact I was clearly bumped because they thought they could make some extra money.

Result = no sleep before one of the biggest meetings in the history of Nimsoft.

Result = they finally comp'd a Parlor room for me (smoking yuk!) - still no sleep

Result = I, and Nimsoft will never stay there again

Unbelievable....I bought and paid for something - what gives them the right to not provide it to me?

Of course because guess what? Gary's spending more time in airports. This time sitting in SFO waiting for my red-eye to the East Coast tonight.

We are continuing to do well in new deals - another significant Managed Service Provider came on board today - I can't remember exactly how many that is this quarter, but for MSPs that have scale and want the best, Nimsoft is clearly the go to brand.

I spent my day in customer meetings today....3 separate meetings with 3 CEOs of MSPs. I really enjoy this interaction - I always learn something new and I find it truly interesting how different MSPs have different themes on their market.

And finally....for the customer that I am going to see (and the sales rep that booked the meeting and got me on this red-eye tonight)....it's my birthday tomorrow. Yep, I will be somewhere over Ohio when my b-day comes (hopefully sleeping) and I will spend the day on the East Coast and probably flying back tomorrow night (although you never know).

25th June 19xx - the date I was born. .......going to see Chelsea Handler in concert this weekend to celebrate.

Some people see records as the pinnacle of achievement. Others see them as merely another stepping stone to the ultimate goal.

Today Nimsoft broke its record deal size.....again! A hugely visible and amazing customer name - one of the best companies in the world.

Congratulations to the Nimsoft team for delivering such an amazing product with incredible support that drives incredible customer value.

Thanks to the customer for your trust - we will continue to deliver in the manner that you've come to expect from us.

In Network World today....full article

How to dramatically cut costs on network performance monitoring

IT Best Practices Alert By Linda Musthaler , Network World , 06/19/2009
Musthaler

The economic downturn and reduced IT budgets are forcing many network managers to look for alternative (read that as "cheaper") products and solutions for managing their networks. If you find yourself in this boat, then read on. This article is about a performance and availability monitoring solution that competes with the enterprise products from companies like CA, IBM, HP and BMC Software. At the same time, this solution is saving its users hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars.

Do you find that savings number hard to believe? So did I when I first talked to the executives at Nimsoft, purveyors of software for service-level management and business-service management. Then I talked with Scott Crowder, the vice president of the Internet Services Division of Blackbaud. Crowder is responsible for data center operations at Blackbaud, a $300 million company that services more than 20,000 nonprofit organizations (NPOs) around the world. Blackbaud's software helps the NPOs raise funds through donations made online, so Blackbaud's Web applications are mission-critical.

Blackbaud operates four major data centers in North America, and it has just acquired another in The Netherlands. Each of the North American data centers has about 20 racks holding thousands of servers that process the donation transactions and run online marketing applications and e-mail processes. Crowder's team monitors the performance and availability of the servers to ensure that the business applications are always available and performing within specific service levels.

About two years ago, Blackbaud adopted the Nimsoft Monitoring Solution (NMS, formerly called NimBUS) in one of its divisions. The results were so good that Blackbaud adopted NMS across the entire enterprise, displacing two other enterprise monitoring tools that had been in place for years. Crowder says the tools that Blackbaud took out had onerous licensing terms that made it cost prohibitive to scale the solutions when needed. The annual maintenance fees alone were very costly. What's more, the old tools didn't offer all the features Blackbaud needed.

Crowder estimates that Blackbaud saved about $750,000 on the initial purchase of the Nimsoft software versus the other tools. The company is realizing annual savings on maintenance in the range of $50,000 to $60,000, or possibly even more.

$120 to fill up my rental car in the UK - can't wait to get back to the California Prius that takes $19 for a full tank :)

Shameless plug....you MUST attend our upcoming webinars on scalability

June 17th 6am Pacific/9am Eastern/2pm for the UK/3pm for Central Europe - register here

Then again the same day at

June 17th 11am Pacific/2pm Eastern - register here

You will here about the real life testing we've done with customers and why Nimsoft has such incredible scalability.

Is it truly the most scalable on the planet? Well, truth be told we're not completely sure...all we know is that some of the most demanding environments in the world are trying to find the limits and not getting there and we don't know anyone else that can cope with some of the massive infrastructures of today as well as we can.

I'm sure they'll be plenty of competitors tuning in for this one :)

5 out the top 20 managed hosting providers are Nimsoft customers.....pretty good stuff.

We've got a big couple of weeks ahead of us. Working with some huge companies and huge visibility pieces of business.

That means lack of sleep for me and many others in the company - hoping to take my kids to LA for a few days over 4th July weekend.

to say that I kinda like Bing? But where's the blog search capabilities?

Excellent end to May for Nimsoft...multiple new and repeat pieces of business won this week....including a major East Coast Managed Service Provider that we are very proud to have won their business - they certainly put our technology and our people through the ringer.

I hate to say (in this economy) that I'm quietly confident for a strong Q2 but........we'll see.

McAfee acquiring Solidcore for a decent multiple
EMC acquiring Configuresoft for a good multiple as well
Solarwinds positive IPO

Couple of fire-sales as well of companies that simply can't make it.

Big companies will buy at the bottom of the market where they can get the best bargains (sort of like buying at the bottom of the housing market).
The walking dead will finally die off.

These all seem like signs of the market shaking itself out ready for a recovery.

Made a quick trip to SoCal today to visit customers and partners. I find that so few people truly understand the Managed Service Provider space, it's a joy when we meet with individuals that really get it!

Stopped off to watch Man Utd get mauled by Barcelona in the Champions League....amazing how a team so good can perform so badly.

Our new Biz Dev leader joined yesterday...this is huge for us as we've got so many things that we're trying to do that we need someone to help juggle some of the balls for us.

Interviewing for additional sales leadership in both Europe and the US. Got some amazingly talented individuals that we're talking to - the team just keeps getting stronger.

Congratulations to EMC and Configuresoft for that acquisition announcement today - looks like everyone is happy with that one. I'm assuming that EMC are becoming more and more competitive with BMC, HP, IBM in the world of the big-boys as they are rounding out their portfolio.

Had a wonderful dinner at Hakkasan in London on Friday night and the flight home yesterday was uneventful.

Would you believe that, while in the bar at Hakkasan we spotted and chatted to some people that we know from where we live in Los Gatos....amazing, thousands of miles away, and they happen to be in the same bar, in the same city at exactly the same time as us.

Earlier in the week, walking through the streets of London, I bumped in to an ex-colleague of mine that I haven't seen for probably 12 years. He's the country manager for CA in the UK - hmm, I'll say no more.

Tons of emails to catch up on, but pretty much done most of them - the beauty of long, boring flights. It's nice to be back in California weather, although I need to go for long runs this week to lose those extra pounds that I put on in England.

Very, very successful trip. We've had a number of changes recently with the UK sales team, but I'm confident that we've got a great team in place now. Some new blood coming in plus, our existing top performers are still performing incredibly, and one rep that left us over a year ago coming back to re-join the company. I'm very proud that we've never lost one of our premier sales performers.

Got a day trip to SoCal planned this week, but also got a few personal things to catch up on. Looking forward to Memorial Day weekend - hoping that the weather holds out.

Nimsoft poised to remain consolidator in quest to challenge Big Four

Now that it has completed its product integration of Indicative Software and is beginning to do the same with the assets that it recently obtained from Cittio, what is Nimsoft's next move in its continuing effort to compete with IBM (NYSE: IBM), Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ), BMC Software (NYSE: BMC) and CA Inc (NYSE: CA)? Business transaction management, desktop monitoring and management and more root cause analysis tools could all be on the company's shopping list.

Context

Nimsoft recently closed its second acquisition in a little over a year, buying source code and other IP from Cittio for an undisclosed amount in a deal made with cash on hand that likely amounted to a fire sale. Once the transaction became public, Cittio shut down its website, replacing it with a message saying that it was winding down operations and dissolving. The purchase will give Nimsoft technology for level 2 and 3 network discovery and topology mapping, monitoring and root cause analysis, filling another gap in its growing suite of IT performance and availability management offerings that it is positioning as an alternative to the Big Four IT management framework vendors' software.

This follows up on Nimsoft's purchase last April of Indicative. That pickup has given the acquirer new software for user experience management and its recently announced Business Service Management (BSM) Express offering, which shows how IT service performance impacts the business services they support.

Nimsoft has enjoyed a great deal of success and rapid growth selling mostly to the midmarket and to managed service providers (MSPs). The vendor has expanded from just over 300 customers in mid-2006 to about 850 today. It grew from $10.2m in bookings in 2005 to $29.4m in 2007, then stated that 2008 bookings were $40m-50m. However, it also disclosed that bookings increased by 47% over 2007, which would put the exact number at about $43.2m. While Nimsoft likely did not reach its stated goal of $50m in revenue by 2008, it continues to grow.

Filling more technology gaps, especially those that will make it more appealing to large enterprises, will ensure continued growth for Nimsoft.

Likely targets

Nimsoft's strength remains performance and availability monitoring. Cittio gives it solid technology in this area for the network. Indicative upgraded Nimsoft's technology for the user-experience end of application monitoring and gave it the kind of reporting, metrics and dashboards that enable IT organizations to measure the impact of IT service performance on the business services they support. Nimsoft already had extensive monitoring capabilities for applications, servers, databases and service-level agreements.

The firm is positioning its existing offerings for the cloud, which we think it should be able to do fairly easily given its penetration of the MSP market and the fact that its software has extensive capabilities for monitoring IT service levels – including in virtualized environments – and assessing their impact on business services, which is technology that would be necessary for managing private cloud environments. We believe Nimsoft will for now maintain its focus on performance and availability management rather than make a leap into IT asset, service and configuration management, though it will certainly have opportunities to enter the latter down the road.

So how can Nimsoft extend its IT performance management and availability wares? The desktop is one possibility. Beyond managing application performance from the end-user perspective, the vendor doesn't really have monitoring software for client devices. We wouldn't expect it to make a huge investment, either, but a tuck-in acquisition is possible.

One potential target is Persystent Technologies, which has strong technology for detecting and resolving PC system failures or performance degradations at boot-up. Buying Persystent could also give Nimsoft a start in IT asset and configuration management as well as policy management and enforcement. Acquiring Vector Networks would have similar benefits for Nimsoft: extending performance management to the desktop, while providing IT asset and service management, including helpdesk, at the same time.

Triumfant would be another possibility with its desktop monitoring plus automated incident management and problem resolution, which is technology that Nimsoft doesn't really have at any level, but could move into and apply to the other layers of IT infrastructure that it monitors. However, much of Triumfant's focus is on finding and removing malware, corrupted registry keys and detecting violations of IT policy. Nimsoft is more likely to stick to performance and availability management rather than make a foray into endpoint security.

Another option for Nimsoft would be to extend its service-level monitoring into business transaction management – tracking business transactions through layers of IT infrastructure and pinpointing the cause of service degradations, which Nimsoft already monitors for. DynaTrace software, whose strength is primarily in pre-deployment testing, could be a good fit for Nimsoft here. OpTier is another startup in this space, but is currently well-funded and growing, and is not seeking a buyer. Israeli company Correlsense, which hasn't made the big splash it intended to in this sector, is a better match. BlueStripe Software has some interesting technology in this area for heavily virtualized environments and some early customer traction, but will likely seek more growth on its own for the time being.

Nimsoft might also make a foray into the performance management of service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and the composite applications that comprise them. SOA Software, AmberPoint and Nastel Technologies are all possibilities here, with Nastel probably being the closest thing to a performance management pure play among those three and therefore perhaps the best option.

Acquiring Cittio gave Nimsoft root cause analysis software for the network, which was a key part of the deal. Nimsoft may look to add root cause analysis software for the other layers of IT that it monitors. Netuitive and Integrien would be the most suitable targets here, with a better deal to be had for the smaller Integrien.

While it's tempting to predict that Nimsoft will make an acquisition to improve its cloud management positioning, we think the company will make the most of its moves in this area from technology that it already has. Besides, cloud management means a lot of things right now, and any emerging players in this space are way too early stage to be ideal targets.

Looking ahead

After buying Indicative, Nimsoft released two new products obtained through the acquisition over the next year, the Real User Monitoring appliance last summer and the BSM Express offering in April. Less than a month after the second launch, the vendor announced that it had purchased certain assets of Cittio. If that pattern continues, Nimsoft will first integrate the acquired IP and source code into its software, which is a process that likely won't be completed until sometime in the fourth quarter. We would then expect Nimsoft to become acquisitive again. It may move sooner, though, since the product integration of Cittio's technology will be a much smaller job than that of Indicative's.

We'd rank dynaTrace as the best fit for Nimsoft. Its pre-deployment capabilities, deep-dive diagnostics, root cause analysis and even SOA visibility would fill many of the gaps in Nimsoft's existing product suite and be an excellent complement to its extensive monitoring capabilities. Failing dynaTrace, we could also see Nimsoft picking up Integrien, a company that has achieved limited traction with its strict focus on root cause analysis, and is clearly positioning itself to be bought at the right price. Either Persystent or Vector would be a good catch for Nimsoft at the desktop performance management level, with Vector providing the added benefit of IT asset and service management, should Nimsoft choose to close that IT management loop.

In any case, with the economic downturn forcing some vendors to make the best deal they can and move on (see Cittio), this remains a buyer's market and we don't think Nimsoft will wait another year to strike again.

Congratulations to the German team, another new customer in Germany today and....one in France as well.

Spent the week in Europe again - Ireland on Tuesday and then rest of the week in England. Mainly customer visits and also a lof of interviewing as we are looking to add to the team.

So far, 2 customer visits on Tuesday in Ireland, 4 on Wednesday in England, none today (in office) and 2 (maybe 3) tomorrow. I think that's the kind of meeting volume and quality that would make a field sales executive happy.

We're into the second beta version of our new Service Delivery Portal....extending it out to about 12-15 customers...tons of new development - it's exciting stuff.

The news is out, Nimsoft has made another asset purchase that will further extend our product's capabilities and allow customers to continue to reduce the number of tools that they use.

At Nimsoft, we believe in building a solid product and a solid business over many years which is what we've done. We believe in actually generating revenue, building our customer base, supporting our customers in an exemplary fashion. And we believe in extending our product continually because, even though we already have by far the best product in this space, we always want to keep making it better.

This purchase was completely opportunistic for us. We had an engineering project internally to build Layer2/Layer3 discovery but the opportunity came along to acquire some technology that was already built and working in customers.

We will not be using any of the OpenNMS components of the Cittio products, we will only be using the discovery, topology and RCA - and we will be taking their code and working it in to the Nimsoft Monitoring Solution. This purchase is all about us being able to provide this capability more rapidly to our customers.

So, what next? Well now that I've done the easy part (acquired the source code), it's time for the guys with the big brains to do the engineering and development work involved in lifting this code and dropping it into the Nimsoft product. For our customers, we are expecting to be able to release this in Q4 this year....although we can't be definitive about that until we get a little more in to it.

More later....

Noticed this yesterday, one of our customers quoted in a press article....thanks for the shout-out!

Daniel Granja, an IT manager at Monterey, Calif.-based online retailer Shop.com, also replaced homegrown code, cobbled-together tools and open source products with proprietary software. Shop.com switched from Cacti and other tools to Nimsoft Inc.'s Nimbus.

Shop.com uses Nimbus to monitor hundreds of servers, including internal corporate services and external e-commerce.

"Cacti is free, open source. But you spend your time on it," Granja said. "That had been the solution we were really running on prior to Nimbus. With Nimsoft's support we cut our efforts in half. We'd never been able to monitor the entire environment before, but with Nimbus we are able to."

It's always been a good time to be a Nimsoft customer, but on Monday we will be announcing another technology/source code acquisition that's going to make our product even better.

It will also serve as another data point to show that very small vendors are at HIGH RISK in this economy.

We continue to add features and functions that are normally associated with products many, many times the price and complexity of Nimsoft - the amount of coverage and capability that we've got is simply amazing.

Also, separate subject but we will be announcing the results of some scalability testing soon that will blow everyone away.

Great time to be a Nimsoft customer, horrible time to be a Nimsoft competitor....but then they already know that!

Thanks Remko!

Lips are sealed but more big news coming for our customers and potential customers on Monday.

The best Performance and Availability Monitoring company on the planet is about to get even better......

Plus, we signed a major new contract today with a large Federal Agency

And....I'm on twitter - garynimsoft - in case anyone is the least bit interested (as if the blog was not boring enough)

BMC announcing their results tomorrow - looks like they are expected to be strong although it's been Bladelogic & Remedy driving growth. I heard so many people say that BMC "overpaid" for Bladelogic......I'm not so sure. Talk about a halo effect! Deals with Cisco and Dell driven by the Blade products.

Quest announced their results today - license revenue very weak due to economy. Ugh - they had a tough one.

Noticed in Solarwinds IPO filing that their license revenue in Q1 2009 was essentially flat from Q1 2008. Flat = Excellent for most people in this environment. Hope they pull off the IPO - about time this space had one!

On another note...we've got some interesting announcements to make....not sure if we'll get it out tomorrow - may have to wait until Wednesday.

I saw interesting blog on the Var Guy site today....take a look at http://www.thevarguy.com/2009/05/11/sugarcrm-ceo-change-an-open-source-setback/


Really interesting to me where these open source business models end up. Also, I wonder what Oracle is going to do with MySQL when it gets its hands on it? Of course nobody will know for sure for quite a while

It still amazes me the length of the summer holiday for kids in America. My guys are off for 11 weeks....when I was at school in England it was only 6 weeks summer holiday.

We're busy planning for all those camps to fill that time. Flag Football camp for one, Horse Riding camp for another, school camp for a few weeks, sports camp at the gym for other weeks....it's a big job all this planning and then, some of the camps are 11 until 3....hmm, how to get them to camp, pick them up from camp and still work?

Taking 2 of the kids over to the England to spend a week with their cousins and grand-parents in the middle of all that as well, and probably some family vacation, possibly in LA.

3 customer meetings in the UK today....2 good ones with existing customers, the other one talking to a customer where we lost a deal recently (yes, we do lose sometimes). All really good meetings.

New Sales Execs on board in the UK (we've had some changes recently) - they are getting into the swing of things. Still so many areas where we can improve within the company.

Numbers for the quarter....well I won't tempt fate. April was solid (that's my word for not spectacular but not bad either), we are in and winning lots and lots of deals but...they've got to close.

Grey Goose in the Sky Bar in Oslo and it's now 2am and I have to leave the hotel at 8 so I better get some sleep.

Always learn something new every time.

Just come from a major oil company and now going to meet the UK MD of a major outsourcer/managed service provider.

Meanwhile, thanks to the power of 3G mobile cards, can update blog from the train.

Doing interviews this afternoon for some new hires, more customers tomorrow and then off to Oslo to visit with the R&D team for Friday and then....back to California.

Great to see Man Utd win so comfortably last night. Chelsea or Barcelona await. Unfortunately won't be able to go to the final in Rome.

I asked someone a question a while back on how do you drive comments to your blog?

Well...guess I have the answer....make some comments about Open Source business models that could be construed as controversial or negative.

:)

Just arrived on an overnight flight to London. In the cabin where I was seating the light switch was broken - so I spent all night with bright fluorescent lights shining at me. Really made for a good journey.

This was announced earlier...

Springsource Acquires Hyperic To Unify Developer To Datacenter Application Lifecycle

Really not a surprise at all. I've been saying for a long time that being successful in this space is difficult and my belief is that any "monitoring" company that tries to use the "give the open source away and charge for the professional edition" as its business model will fail. We've seen many of these already and they will continue to fail.

Look at who the most successful and rapidly growing companies are today.....Nimsoft, Service-Now, NetQoS, Solwarwinds.....none of these companies are using the open source business model.

Don't get me wrong...I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with using Nagios or other platforms for monitoring. They fill a need and for certain environments they fill the need very well. BUT, what I am saying is that vendors that try to build a business out of offering a "professional edition" will fail. Monitoring/systems management is NOT sexy - it is hard work. It requires support for a huge range of platforms, constant testing, constant updating, scalability, reliability....all those things that we take very seriously.

More will fail.....

So far today:

Board meeting, customer meeting, investment bank meeting, partnership meeting, internal blitz going on, trying to get hold of our lawyers, re-booking flights for next week so that I can go to Oslo as well as London, canceling handyman for broken dishwaher .....and my assistant is on PTO!

Austin’s IPO drought may be ending
By Lori Hawkins

Could it be? An Austin IPO? It’s sure looks that way.

This morning, software maker SolarWinds Inc. said it plans to offer 12.1 million shares at an estimated price range of $9.50 to $11.50 a share. That could net upwards of $100 million.

And the IPO could make its investors — Austin Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures and Insight Ventures — some money too. According to filings, all plan to sell some shares in the IPO. (Although AV is a minor player in SolarWinds, owning just 3.4 percent of shares before the offering.)

SolarWinds, which is profitable and had revenue of $93.1 million in 2008, would be Austin’s first IPO since 2006, when Golfsmith Holdings International stumbled out the gate. Nationally, there has been a drought of IPOs as well, with only two new issues on major U.S. stock exchanges in the first quarter, according to Hoover’s Inc.

Three Austin companies have withdrawn IPO filings in the past year: Creditcards.com, Convio Inc. and Capstar Acquisition Corp.

It’s unclear when SolarWinds will go out, but it could be as early as today. (And then again, there’s always the possibility it won’t happen at all. It will depend on investor reaction.)

SolarWinds was founded in Tulsa, Okla., 11 years ago, and moved to Austin in late 2006 when local high-tech veteran Mike Bennett took over as CEO. Austin Ventures invested $7.5 million in the company in early 2007, joining Bain and Insight as backers.

If and when an IPO happens, SolarWinds will trade under the symbol SWI on the New York Stock Exchange.

Nice going to the US sales team.....3 brand new customers today - 1 end-user Enterprise and 2 Managed Service Providers.

Good going.

Never normally one to comment on rumors, but I have heard this one from multiple different places over the last couple of days.

Certain large Big-4 vendor in the final throws of buying Solarwinds....I know that BMC don't have any network monitoring offerings but....

From The451.com today.....

Analyst: Karin Kelley
Date: 27 Apr 2009

Australian managed service provider (MSP) Interactive has deployed Nimsoft's Monitoring Solutions in its datacenters. Interactive's IT administrators are using Nimsoft's Service Delivery Portal to create custom dashboard views of systems performance and availability monitoring data. Interactive's customers can access the data online to ensure that service-level agreements are being met. With five datacenters in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, the MSP provides hosting and maintenance services for more than 1,200 businesses in Australia, New Zealand and the surrounding Pacific Islands. Interactive claims more than A$60m ($43m) in annual services revenue and plans to invest A$900,000 ($650,000) on eco-efficient IT this year.

All received in the last 10 days....there was a fourth example but I'm not allowed to publish it as it is a government customer...

Others may talk the talk - Nimsoft walks the walk.

Example #1

Mr. Gary Read,

Your Director of Customer Support, XXXXXX, just took my tech support call at 10pm London time, and spent an hour from 10pm-11pm on a Friday night outside of London on the phone with me troubleshooting a problem.....

Please thank XXXXX for me. He is truly a dedicated Nimsoft employee, and he is a great example of a hard-worker who puts the customer first.

Warm regards,

Example #2

Hey mate,

XXX has been a star!!... he has spent about 4 hours working on this and although we are only speculating what the problem was caused by he has made some good suggestions on how the tunnels and some other things should be structured for an MSP.

The end result is that I have started to restructure... ... and they have stayed connected and are working fine.

Once again he had been excellent and should be kept in good supply of beer for the next could of weeks he is here!
Thanks for your help today too with getting him in touch.

Example #3

XXXX,

Once again, your contribution is of amazing service. Thank you so much
for your help. My new module is working perfectly after your
assistance..... In any event, our project is back on
track... once again thanks to you. I really appreciate your help in our
efforts.

XXX - Thanks for keeping track of this. This matter is closed from our
perspective.

In the last 7 days, I have received 4 unsolicited emails and letters from customers expressing their delight with our customer support. In one case, we had someone work over the weekend to help a customer, in another case someone worked late in to the night to do the same thing.

I will be posting each of these letters and emails to the blog as soon as I can get somewhere that I can scan them.

It makes me very proud of the organization and team that we have built.

Tomorrow, we'll be announcing a game changer in BSM. No longer does it takes months to implement, no longer does it take hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy and even more for services, no longer will BSM projects fail to offer value.

BSM Express is in General Availability and is announced publicly tomorrow.

A quick taster of one of the "out of the box" BSM dashboards....




So, how did we get here...what have we done?

Well, first of all, the Indicative acquisition that we made in April of last year was absolutely key. As we told our customers at the time, we purchased Indicative to gain access to the BSM modelling technology that has made it the preferred solution of multiple large environments around the world such as BUPA, NTT, Easynet and The US Department of State.

But, we've spent the last 9 months making an industry leading solution, even better. We've added tight, database level integration with Nimsoft's Monitoring Solution. We've added attractive and highly functional new dashboards that integrate directly with the monitoring dashboards of Nimsoft, we've added multiple "out of the box" business models for common applications - and we'll be adding many more. And, best of all, we're offering all this for a price that is simple unbelievable.

How much? Well...it starts at $10,000 and can go up to $20,000. No...before I get lots of comments, I didn't forget 2 zeros or even 1 zero. Truly, I said Ten Thousand Dollars up to Twenty Thousand Dollars.

How can we do it?

Just like with the Nimsoft Monitoring Solution, we believe that BSM should be available to many customers, not just the largest ones, and just in the same way that we've built over 800 customers using the monitoring solution, we intend to build a large customer base for BSM Express as well.

Our engineers are already hard at work on the second version of BSM Express, we've been code complete on this version for some time and we're already installed in about a dozen or so customers. We expect that number to expand pretty quickly now that we're announced.

This is truly very exciting for us and for the market. One more screenshot to look at....if you want more details, register on our web site or you can always send me an email at garyread@nimsoft.com - we'll be happy to send you the download link.

Had a long day today (well yesterday actually). Started early, did 3 customer visits (2 prospective and 1 existing), did various conference calls and then went to dinner to interview a potential employee. When I'm on the road, it's incredible how long hours I keep - working a double shift effectively because there is nothing else going on in the evening, not sure how healthy it is though. (But, right now it's 5.55am in the UK and I'm about to head to the gym!)

I am looking forward to getting back to California, spending the weekend with the family and then I'm heading off again on Tuesday, but this time for some relaxation hopefully.

It seems at the moment that something new is happening every day in this space and something interesting is coming to Nimsoft very regularly. We're working on a lot of partnerships right now, some that are small but will help our customers get more value and some that are larger and will impact the broader industry.

BSM is coming...I'm finished with the teasing - I believe we are announcing next week. We're already signing customers and we are really happy with the feedback so far.

I hope everyone realizes how significant Cisco's recent moves in to the data center are. This is a huge huge market that they've never played in before and they have an absolute ton of cash to buy their way in.

They've already got existing relationships, so customers are going to listen and treat anything that that say with credibility. Yes, they don't have the track record but....look at VOIP.....they had no track record there and now dominate that space.

Not suggesting that they are going to dominate, after all, the competitors in the data center are pretty formidable in their own right, but I would imagine that they will absolutely take some share.

Time to sit down with a pencil and paper and try to figure out who they are going to buy next - I've made some good money on stocks over the years simply by betting on who is going to be acquired.

In the management space, Cisco are either going to build their own suite by buying lots of smaller players (aka Tidal) or they will buy big for someone who is already established. They tried with Bladelogic before BMC eventually got them and they've snapped up Tidal.

What do they need? Event Management, Service Level Monitoring, BSM, Service Desk, CMDB, Run Book Automation, Network Monitoring - lots of different pieces.

There are some really hot private companies in each of these areas, Nimsoft, Service-Now, Opalis, Stratavia, NetQoS to name just a few.

But, my bet would be on them buying big. I mentioned BMC the other day - the other alternative would be Quest Software - after all Quest have been buying a lot of Virtualization tools themselves over the last couple of years.

Time to sell my stocks in that UK Bank and invest in some BMC and Quest I think.

I travel quite a lot to the UK and every time, I bemoan how inconvenient it is.

First the good stuff....because I have a Gold Card with Virgin then I get to use the arrivals lounge at Heathrow. They iron my shirt and suit and give me a bathroom to shower in, nice cup of coffee....perfect, I can be off the plane and ready to work in less than 30 minutes.

But, what about the hotel? What I'd really like to do is to leave some things in the hotel. Maybe 1 suit, a few shirts etc, maybe some toiletries, and my gym gear. Otherwise, I have to continue to carry this stuff back and forth across the Atlantic.

It doesn't seem too much to ask does it? They could get the shirts dry cleaned as well and of course, I'd always use the same hotel because my stuff would be stored there. Sort of like a locker that you could rent at the hotel.

Anyone know whether this exists? Could be a good business maybe.

Interesting news today with Cisco buying job scheduling company Tidal Software. Wonder how that sits with BMC given the recent datacenter partnership and given that BMC have directly competitive offerings to Tidal products? I actually wonder whether this is a ploy by Cisco because the company that they are really shopping for may be BMC themselves...maybe they tried to buy BMC and couldn't, so instead they try to scare them a little by building there own suite and force BMC back to the negotiating table. Anyhow, far be it from me to start a rumor and I can categorically state that I have absolutely zero information - just pure conjecture by me.

The451 Group are speculating that Cisco will buy more companies to build a suite of offerings and they mention Nimsoft as a potential target. Seems that lots of people are speculating about us these days....guess that's what happens when you are as successful as we are.

After all, who else is there to buy in monitoring and service level management? Most everyone else is tiny and their products are very limited - Nimsoft scales up and down from mid-market to the largest enterprise and has such a healthy managed services and cloud business.

But, Nimsoft has a long and successful future ahead of it - I was on a call with some of our architects yesterday, we're just about to kick-off a new engineering project internally that is really, really exciting. BSM gets launched any day now - is it next week?

Dug a little more into the Q1 results today, some interesting stats.

49% increase in New Bookings for MSPs
110% increase in new MSPs signing up in the quarter with Nimsoft

This is in addition to the 54% increase in monthly recurring revenue

The MSP business has continued to be really strong for us.

Airport hotels...don't you love them? Especially ones at Heathrow....

Had a whirlwind but GREAT trip to the UK. Spent all day yesterday with the sales team - spent the night watching European Champions League football and spent today in the office and then shaking hands with a customer on a very large piece of business for us.

Although, I must say, half way through writing this blog my room service arrived. I had decided to order curry - I figured that sleeping in a hotel room smelling of curry was OK. But, the room service waiter managed to drop the entire plate on to my hotel room floor. So, right now I have a hotel room floor covered in curry and I'm waiting for housekeeping to come and clean it up.

So, I'm now hungry, tired and have curry-floor in an airport hotel at Heathrow. What a glamorous life I lead!

At least it missed my luggage (see, there is always a silver lining).

We should get our Q1 results press release out on Monday. Overall pretty solid overall performance - not quite the hyper-growth of the past, but good continued momentum and positive cash flow.

Off to London again soon - I think Richard Branson should love me. Going to see Lily Allen in concert tomorrow night......

Why is it that an ex-employee feels the need to spread malicious and false rumors about us?

Why is it that the same person is so cowardly that they hide behind an "anonymous" title and pretend to be a customer of ours?

Maybe you don't work with us any more but does that mean that you want to make blog posts that are factually incorrect and the only possible intent could be to try and damage things for all of our employees and customers?

Oh well....good luck to you - I hope you sleep better tonight knowing that you have contributed constructively to the world being a better place.

Opened my inbox to a new Gartner report today entitled

"Has market consolidation killed IT Operations management tool innovation"


Interesting piece....I cannot post it here because it is copyrighted - suggest that you use your Gartner subscription to download a full copy or give us a call and we'll talk to you about it.

Significant market consolidation has left few IT operations management vendors with annual revenue between $50 million and $1 billion. The ramifications are important to understand as IT organizations look for advances in IT operations management technology to deal with growing IT complexity.

Cisco's announcement Monday will mean some interesting decisions for their partners and VARs who are often partners with HP as well. Bladelogic being included on the servers....wonder what a Cisco partner that resells Opsware does? Seen and heard lots of different opinions....

But, back to Nimsoft business, I spoke to a major Managed Service Provider today (not yet a customer of ours). They told me, I quote, "You are sitting on an absolute goldmine. Your product is simply amazing for MSPs and there is nothing else out there".

I completely agree. The big guys just don't get it, the smaller platforms cannot scale or don't have the breadth. Nimsoft really is in a unique position.

Now...we also have another MSP that is telling us that they are evaluating Solarwinds and that "Solarwinds is much less expensive".

Our answer...."we don't compete with Solarwinds". It's a low cost, web download toolset that's all about "stack it high and sell it cheap". Don't get me wrong, I'm not being negative about Solarwinds for a minute - it's an excellent tool for network engineers. If someone truly thinks that the Solarwinds product and company can provide them the capabilities and support that they need to support a growing managed service business....then they should go for it.

Anyhow, 7 more business days to end of quarter...business is good but I've got to say, many customers are "sitting on their hands" delaying decisions.

But, stock market is up right?

I really have to thank folks that read this blog. I am so horribly inconsistent with the timing of my posts....I'm sure I'd have given up on me a long time ago. Some are long, some are short - some about business, some about my ridiculous life style.

What shall we ramble about today....

BSM - launch date has been set for mid-April, already installed at about 10 customers and feedback has been eeencredibel. Sorry for the constant teasing on this one but we've been working hard on this and think that we have a game-changer; our engineers and product management team have done a good job on this one. Don't want to let the cat out of the bag too early.

We are also code-complete with the next version of our Service Delivery Portal - lots of new functionality and enhancements - looking to ship in Q2

Delivered our first Cloud Computing webinar recently (not me of course, we needed someone that actually knew something) - was a great success. Lots of buzz about Cloud right now - some real, some hype of course. We'll be issuing white papers and customer cases studies in the next week or so. We actually already have customers using Nimsoft to monitoring Cloud Computing resources (yes....real customers paying real money)

Presented at the Montgomery Technologies conference this week in Santa Monica - unbelievable...the place was packed. I was trying to figure out whether all these software execs were "doing deals" with each other to combine their companies or whether they had nothing better to do :) Suspect it is a little of both - lots of companies looking around for other companies to buddy up with right now; we get a lot of approaches and certainly may look at adding new products in to our portfolio at some time.

Next couple of weeks involve multiple trips to SoCal....trip to East Coast and back over the pond again to London.

Also...anyone see that comment on my blog about the rumor of BMC buying Nimsoft? Funny...I remember the days when XX big company buying YY smaller company would be regular rumors....normally they are started by XX big company employees because they keep losing business to YY smaller company and they try to create FUD in the eyes of the customer. But...not sure that is true in this case because we actually don't see BMC too much in competitive deals.....HP would be another matter....wonder if the HP team are starting nasty rumors?

Gotta run....our operations team are about to present a new accounting package to me......no comments please...I've had extra caffeine ---LOL

What a week....started Sunday night red-eye to Boston....

Prospective and existing customer meetings in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey and New York on Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday. Think about this British guy driving around the East Coast, including driving around Manhattan....and you'd be right, I got lost A LOT (Hertz Never Lost is absolutely the worst GPS ever - I am a case study for the nickname Forever Lost)

Then, after running through JFK to make my flight, I arrived in London at 6am Thursday morning. Into the office for 4 sales reviews with the sales team, then train in to London for prospective customer meeting. Down to Brick Lane for a ruby for dinner and then two more customer meetings on the Friday and then, lunch with our VP EMEA talking about the year ahead.

Visited my parents on Friday night....awaiting news of my brother and his wife who, upon knowing that I was heading back to California in the morning, proceeded to deliver twin baby boys just in time for me to visit them in hospital at 4.30am this morning so that I could make it to Heathrow in time (thanks Lisa!)

Now...sitting in the Virgin lounge because the flight back is delayed. A long week but a good week both professionally and personally. Looking forward to getting home and re-uniting with my family again.

We have got multiple new releases coming out of engineering that we are looking for beta customers for. Looking for existing customers that can act as beta for....

Citrix Xen Server monitoring
Microsoft Hyper-V

and of course, we are in active beta with our Business Service Management offering.

Any existing customers want to try these new offerings? If so, contact your account manager or email our support team.

First, apologies for just throwing up Mark Hurd's email without adding any commentary. I just finished a couple of days vacation with the kids and.....phew, now I'm home and can start to recover!!

Anyhow, did anyone notice the stark difference between BMC's results and HP's? BMC over-achieved on their earnings, and increased guidance.....HP disappointed and reduced guidance. Why you may wonder? They are both dealing with the same customers aren't they?

Well, some personal comments.

First of all, BMC has been constantly cutting costs and right-sizing itself for multiple years. From what I can see they have done a tremendous job of getting the expenses under control and, I know that it is has been tough for their employees for a number of years, but now they are reaping the rewards. Also, they made a couple of big and brave bets. The Remedy purchase a number of years ago has been an absolute gold-mine for BMC and then their more recent acquisition of Bladelogic is a game changer for them. Many people have commented that they overpaid for Blade but, what did they buy? Well, not only did they buy a second engine of growth for the company in a hot space to put alongside Remedy, but they also bought a whole new culture and sales team. Everyone knows that the Blade team has taken over the business unit at BMC and this is probably the biggest single change and dare I say, a major reason for their positive results.

The stories that I hear coming out of HP on the other hand, is that they still think and act like a hardware company. The software sales team does not appear to be "top of the pile" and instead has to follow archaic and complex hardware sales procedures. Try asking HP Software for a quote....see if you can get something back in less than 24 hours. In my opinion, and please remember that these are all personal comments and after all, what do I know....but HP gave up their single best opportunity to change the culture when they tried to integrate Mercury. Why oh why didn't they leave it as a stand-alone business and let the Mercury leadership take over HP Software rather than the other way round. Remember....when BMC acquired Remedy, they left it alone. When BMC acquired Blade, they have given the Blade team the power to get it done.

Anyhow, when you look closer at the BMC results, their growth is all powered by Remedy and Bladelogic. Their Service Assurance business (Patrol etc) is still declining pretty rapidly in a market that has been growing for many years. Let's face it, Patrol and related products (Best1, Performance Manager, Proactivenet and multiple others), are also-rans right now.

And what about Nimsoft's experience? Well, keep in mind that our sample size is relatively small but, we don't see BMC in our deals because they are focused on other disciplines where they have market-leading products.

But, for HP, they are our most-replaced competitor....

I wonder...if other companies are having similar success at replacing HP as much as we are then maybe, just maybe that contributed to their poor results. An eroding maintenance base is never good for business.

Finally, I want to say that these are worrying times for many people. Job losses, salaries and benefits reduced and bad news at every turn. I wish everyone the best - just remember that sometimes the medicine doesn't taste good at the time, but helps cure us in the longer term.

From: CEO, Mark Hurd@hp.com
Sent: Wednesday, February 18, 2009 4:48 PM
Subject: HP Announces Q1, FY09 Results

Employees can access a video replay of Mark?s Q1, FY09 performance review message on hpNOW .
Today, HP announced first quarter results amid one of most difficult economic downturns that any of us has ever faced. I am proud to say that we continue to execute well in this very challenging environment.

We grew revenue 1 percent year-over-year, or 4 percent in local currency, and you need to look at these numbers a little differently this quarter. For the first time in a long time, the dollar was strengthening, so the currency conversion was actually a headwind for us. We also continued to show strong operating leverage with non-GAAP operating profit up 10 percent year-over-year. This was a solid performance, and I thank all of you for your efforts.

But really, Q1 was like a tale of two companies.

HP Services ? as a result of EDS and TS ? had a strong quarter, delivering virtually all of the local currency revenue growth and more operating profit than any other business. It?s gratifying, because this performance was possible because of the hard work we?ve been doing to restructure those businesses.

When you take HP services out of the mix, it?s a very different picture. PSG had revenue down 19%. ESS had revenue down 18%. IPG had revenue down 19%. In fairness, across IT and even other industries, product businesses are struggling in this economic climate. And we did gain share in key market segments. PSG and ESS gained roughly 1 and 3 points of share, respectively. In IPG, quite frankly, we still have work to do across a number of dimensions like inventory, both owned and channel inventory.

In an environment like this, there?s no margin for error and no tolerance for inaction. To give you a little insight into my world, after we report our earnings, we engage in a dialogue with analysts and investors. They?re going to ask what we?re doing in light of the current environment to right-size these businesses.

The math is pretty straight forward. From a productivity standpoint, you?re supposed to reduce headcount on par with declining revenue. If you believe the environment isn?t going to improve, you should take a bigger cut to get in front of the problems. You can do the calculation, as easy as I can. We have about 100,000 people in our product businesses, with revenue down roughly 20%, and an environment that may not get any better in 2009.

I?ll be asked by investors, ?Where?s the job action, where are you taking out this roughly, 20,000 positions?? Well, I don?t want to do that. When I look at HP, I don?t see a structural problem of that magnitude. There are pockets where restructuring needs to happen, and areas where actions will be taken as part of our ongoing workforce optimization process. But at a company-wide level, I don?t believe a major workforce reduction is the best thing for HP at this time.

I think we are fundamentally sound, and when the economy picks up, I want HP to be strong, and to take share and to outgrow the market. I said it last quarter, my goal is to keep the muscle of this organization intact. But we do have to do something?because the numbers just don?t add up and we need to have the flexibility to make the right long-term investments for HP.

So we are going to take action. We have decided to further variablize our cost structure by reducing base pay and some benefits across HP. My base pay will be reduced by 20 percent. The base pay of Executive Council members will be reduced by 15 percent. The base pay of other executives will be reduced by 10 percent. The base pay of all other exempt employees will be reduced by 5 percent. For non-exempt employees, base pay will be reduced by two-and-a-half percent. Additional efficiencies, including changes to the US 401(k) plan and the share ownership plan, will also be implemented. Of course, the implementation of all of these actions is subject to compliance with local laws and regulations. Follow-up communications will detail the timing and the plans in your location.

This does not change our pay-for-performance strategy at HP. If we outperform, and there is a chance we will, then we will increase the total amount of variable pay. In fact, the financial flexibility we?re gaining helps put us in a better position to compete and to win in the marketplace, and fund the bonus program this year based on pre-adjusted salaries. If the company performs well, if our individual businesses perform well and if you perform well, then you could potentially make up the difference with your bonus. I can't promise you anything, but I tell you...there is a chance...if we get this right.

To be clear, these actions don?t make up for all of the decline in revenues. We?re also benefiting from the tough actions we?ve taken over the last few years. People always asked, ?Why are we so focused on getting costs out in good times?? Now?is why that work was so important. We?ve been able to bank some of those savings, and we?re making a withdrawal, which along with the actions we?re taking today, I hope, will get us through this recession.

Again, there are no guarantees. If the environment gets worse, if the downturn lasts longer than we?re assuming, if our performance declines, we?ll have to reassess. But for now I believe this is the right thing for the strength of HP.

I know this is a tough time. But if we get this right, HP can be the kind of company that not only has led, but will extend its leadership. We can emerge from this recession in a powerful position to create value for our customers, our shareholders and our people for years to come.

Thank you.

Mark

Saw this article in the WSJ this morning....Silicon Valley is definitely suffering right now. I live in a small town called Los Gatos, and normally it is somewhat immune from the broader economy (i.e. lots of rich people live here....I just snuck in through the back-door!). But, this time around I've noticed that multiple of the stores in the town have shut-down, there is empty spaces on the high street, we are seeing Short-sales and disclosures and my kids school wrote to us the other day to say that they were likely going to have to reduce their staff as property tax receipts were expected to be lower.

For the tech start-up, it seems as though you are in one of two categories. Either you (a) Have cash, make positive cash-flow and therefore you are a potential buyer of the some of the distressed companies or (b) If you don't have or are losing money, then you are seen as a company that needs to find a buyer. Clearly I am generalizing but you can almost see it in the eyes of the investors and banks - in the first 5 minutes they are sizing you up to see whether you are a beneficiary or the walking dead.

It's very humbling to see what is going on. Fortunately we fall very much in to the first category. We completed additional funding from Goldman Sachs in September last year and we are growing very fast and making money....that means that we are getting lots of smaller companies knocking on our door to see if they "join forces" and we may well take advantage of some of those opportunities if it can help our customers and ourselves.

Anyhow, we have always tried to run a tight ship at Nimsoft which is not always the easiest thing to do with employees "why can't I fly direct rather than taking a connection....it's only $500 more" but it is in times like these that everyone becomes thankful.

Anyhow...read on....


More Tech Start-Ups Call It Quits
As Funding Dries Up, Fledgling Silicon Valley Firms Are Shutting Down; Fears of Chill on Innovation


By PUI-WING TAM and BEN WORTHEN

The deepening recession is speeding up the shakeout in Silicon Valley, forcing droves of start-ups to shut down or sell themselves at fire-sale prices.

Many start-ups survived last year by slashing costs and deferring development projects. But as demand for their products continues to deteriorate and funding dries up, these young firms are now running out of lifelines. Many are calling it quits, recalling the dot-com bust earlier this decade.

'You're going to see a major shakeout,' says Martin Pichinson, a wind-down specialist, above. Jeff Yasuda, below, plans to shut down his music site, Fuzz.com.

In recent weeks, start-ups with names such as Attune Systems Inc. and Reactrix Systems Inc. have wound down their operations. Others including Guava Technologies Inc. have sold themselves off for sums far less than what their investors spent on them.

"Start-ups are failing faster and you're going to see a major shakeout," says Martin Pichinson, a managing director of Sherwood Partners, a Mountain View, Calif., firm that specializes in winding down start-ups. Since mid-January, his firm has shut down an average of three start-ups a week, up from just one or two closures a month in September, he says.

Among the companies that Sherwood is currently closing is Allux Medical Inc. The Menlo Park, Calif., firm, which made devices to treat dermatological problems, had raised more than $11 million in funding. In December, Sherwood also closed down Reactrix Systems, a Redwood City, Calif., interactive media firm that had raised more than $45 million. Mr. Pichinson declined to detail the shutdowns.

Jeff Yasuda, founder and chief executive of San Francisco-based online music start-up Fuzz Artists Inc., plans to shut down his Web site on Friday after deciding he couldn't drive enough visitor traffic to it to make it a viable business.
Turning Out the Lights

As he winds down Fuzz.com, Mr. Yasuda has cut his staff to four people from 12. He still has some money from investors and is working with his remaining staff to preserve a service called Blip.fm, which lets users share short messages about music.

"It's just brutal," says the 36-year-old Mr. Yasuda. "Had the markets been different, I would've been able to raise a lot more capital and maybe I could've given it more of a shot."

The troubles aren't limited to Silicon Valley. VuBotics Inc., an Atlanta maker of software for wireless devices, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in November, while nTag Interactive Corp., a Boston maker of high-tech name tags, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection the day after Christmas.

That such shutdowns have reached tech start-ups shows how far the recession has spread from its Wall Street and housing-sector roots and how it now could slow innovation.

Start-ups are typically where innovative products and services are created, says Richard Mammone, a professor at Rutgers University who has also started several tech companies. In normal conditions, the market rewards the best young companies and only the nonviable ones go bust. But in this economy, "it's not survival of the fittest," he says.

Venture capitalists pulled back sharply in the fourth quarter as credit markets seized and stock markets collapsed. Venture capitalists invested $5.54 billion in U.S. start-ups in the fourth quarter, 27% less than the third quarter, according to data compiled by VentureSource.

Rich Brenner, who runs a Cupertino, Calif., firm that specializes in restructuring start-ups, says this downturn is hurting Silicon Valley companies differently than the dot-com bust, when Internet companies that "should have never been funded" disappeared almost overnight.

This time tech companies aren't at the epicenter of the bust, and failures will take time to play out. Still, "the needle has shifted precipitously in the last six months and now we're starting to see more and more companies strategically stalled," Mr. Brenner cautions.

Attune , a Santa Clara, Calif., software maker ceased operating in December even though employees say the firm had money to keep going through early 2009.

Alan Kessler, Attune's chief executive, says start-ups of Attune's size are highly dependent on partnerships with larger companies and when the markets tumbled, many of those bigger companies "froze."

As a result, Mr. Kessler says he decided the most realistic route for the 25-person company was "to pursue a path to wind down." In November, he announced Attune -- which has raised more than $14 million in funding -- would shut down.

"You fight the good fight and do the best you can," says Mr. Kessler, who last month rejoined 3Com Corp. as a senior executive.

Other start-ups are being pushed by their investors to sell themselves off, even at depressed prices. Jonathan MacQuitty, a venture capitalist at Abingworth Management Ltd. and a board member of Guava Technologies, says he recently encouraged the bioscience company to sell itself.

Demand for Guava's products -- instruments that do cell-based analysis -- have tapered off as pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies reined in their spending, says Mr. MacQuitty.

So earlier this month, Guava agreed to sell itself to Millipore Corp. for $22.6 million; investors had put more than $50 million into the Hayward, Calif., company. The sale price was little more than Guava's revenue, which totaled about $22 million in 2008.

"It wasn't a particularly attractive price but at the same time, if Guava tried to persist, it would have taken a lot of time and money to wait out the current situation," Mr. MacQuitty says.

Overall, 15 U.S. private companies backed by venture capital were sold in January for an average price of $5.7 million. That's down sharply from the average price of $44.2 million that 26 venture-backed U.S. companies fetched in January 2008, according to research firm 451 Group.

For some companies, the shakeout is an opportunity. DemandTec Inc., a San Carlos, Calif., maker of online software for retailers, last month acquired Connect3 Systems Inc., a Cerritos, Calif., start-up that also makes software for retailers. DemandTec bought Connect3, which generated about $8 million in annual revenue and no profits, for $12 million.

Dan Fishback, DemandTec's CEO, says his firm had long been interested in purchasing Connect3 but last year would have had to pay twice as much. Now "it's a buyers market," Mr. Fishback says.

Should be a fun day tomorrow...

First at 11am Pacific Time, we are sponsors of the MSPmentor unveiling of the World's Top 100 Managed Service Providers. Register here to join us, together with MSPmentor, and leading MSPs Fusion Storm and Longview Systems.

Then, at 2.40pm Pacific Time, I am presenting at the Thomas Weisel Technology and Telecom conference that will also be webcast live at this address.

Also jammed full of meetings between these events with various external parties - it's a busy week - Texas and back in a day today!

Yep - we have gone through every single one of the 162 new customers we signed during 2008 and looked at who we competed with and, in the case of a replacement, who we replaced.

Congrats to our friends at HP - we beat them in more competitive evaluations than any other vendor and we also replaced them more times than any other vendor as well. Double first prize....wonder where I should send the trophy to....any ideas?

These messages make my day!


Sachin did an AWESOME job while he was here, thank you very much for coordinating that. We were able to get through our agenda, sort out the outstanding issues and have started our rollout to clients.

Also a special mention for the Support teams, we are very impressed with their focus on resolution and customer service. In addition, the responsiveness of Sachin and the Support team in listening to our feature requests and passing them on to the Dev Team was excellent

Thanks again and we look forward to seeing you and your team again soon

OK, so I'm seriously fed up. I've been on a diet for 3 weeks, working out/running every day and I've not lost a single pound of weight. Darn it!

I love Joe Panettieri's MSPmentor blog......check some of these out regarding Kaseya's CEO....

http://www.mspmentor.net/2008/06/02/kaseya-ceo-gerald-blackie-we-wont-go-public/

http://www.mspmentor.net/2009/02/03/can-kaseya-ever-go-public/#comments

Wow - there looks to be a lot of pretty unhappy people out there - have you read the comments?

In case anyone is wondering, I have never been investigated by the SEC although I did have my tax returns for 2004 audited by the IRS (b*******) and they made me pay extra because, even though I provided them with 2 full boxes of documentation, some receipts were missing.

We've got the MSPmentor100 unveiling coming up on February 11th - tune in for the webcast

It doesn't really mean much in the bigger picture, but Nimsoft has completed a very good January. New sales were significantly increased from January last year (although we didn't do too well in January last year).

Let's hope that this is going to be repeated for the rest of the year. So far, the business forecasts are positive.

Issued our full year 2008 financial results release today. You can see the details here

Also, another new customer video on our site....this time Intellinet

We signed two new customers yesterday including a major airline! Hopefully they'll let us publish their name soon.

Only the second time I have uttered those immortal letters....OMG (the first was reserved for George Michael...for those of you that have not been avid readers of this blog for the last year!).

This time....I was talking to one of our long-term employees (Ken Vanderweel) the other day, and he had a video sitting on his desk - it was of the TV appearance of Converse Software (the predecessor to Nimsoft) that happened over 5 years ago, just as we were starting the company. Funny, because we'd been looking for it everywhere but....as usual, we should have checked Ken's garbage dump (I mean desk!)

Anyhow, here it is - it's actually pretty embarrassing but whatever....

Converse Software CEO on KTVU Silicon Valley Business 2nd November 2003

PS Spot the young Dan Birck showing off his Raquet Ball skills in the background.

Just found out some amazing information about the LINUX and UNIX support that Microsoft, with big fanfare, released a while ago for SCUM (the cross platform extensions)

#1 The ?agent? that sits on the Linux/UNIX server does not do any proactive alerting ? it relies on polling from the SCOM management server!! A polling based approach for server monitoring? Welcome to the 80s everyone! Yep....that's highly efficient and scalable.

#2 The same agent is fat and heavy. Customers have reported 3% CPU utilization when idle, rising to 40-50% CPU utilization when working, Nimsoft agent usage was negligible.

Nobody, just nobody should be buying this. But is anyone surprised that their support for non-MS platforms is so poor?

Maybe given that Windows sales make up a huge portion of their revenue and profit and SCOM sales are negligible by comparison they have another agenda?

Just speculating.....keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

In a few weeks I will be presenting at the Thomas Weisel Partners Technology and Telecom Conference in San Francisco.

The actual time and date is February 11th at 2.40pm PST

For anyone that would like to listen, their is a live webcast that will be available at:

http://www.veracast.com/webcasts/twp/tech09/38203626.cfm

It's only short, 30 mins total and obviously pretty financially focused, but I'll try and keep it interesting....

Gary

Life running a rapidly growing company never stands still. In fact, I believe that it's part of the reason for the success of Nimsoft that we are always willing to make changes and be brave about decisions.

Things that have worked in the past, may not work tomorrow so making change is important.

But...many individuals are always worried about change. Certainly for risk averse individuals they think that "doing the same thing" is the way to continue to guarantee success, but, as I always tell them, the world doesn't stop moving and so neither can we. Our customers expect us to always adapt and improve.

Last week we made some changes in our marketing team. We moved the product marketing guys closer to engineering and product management, we moved the lead generation team into the field organization and we separated out corporate marketing into a stand-alone function. This follows some reasonably large changes in our US sales organization that took place in December.

Budgets are set, programs are being put in place and we're executing.

So far, the forecast for Q1 is strong - we are hoping to publish our Q4 and 2008 results early next week after we get them blessed by the board on Thursday.

Good luck to the new President of the United States - tough set of issues that he's inheriting.

Small example but impressive. As you know we did our field sales and technical training in New Orleans last week. This meant that we had 23 field technical resources that all needed to be trained on new products.

Of course, we wanted them all to have their own server and be able to go through everything from installation to configuration and setup.

Before the event our IT guys suggested that we needed to rent a server, configure with ESX, ship to New Orleans and then every technical person could have their own virtual server.

I, being the cost conscious guy that I am said "why not use the cloud?"

So, passed the ball to our Cloud Meister, Mark Rivington who, engaged IT and support and.....it was a roaring success.

We used one of the commercially available cloud vendors, rented 23 servers for 2 days and we spent a grand total of $100.

The ESX server rental and shipment alternative was $1,700.

Small numbers I know but...a 94% saving in cost...and we got to train all our SEs on using the cloud as well.

Nice. Think about how that would scale....

We will be officially publishing our results in the next few weeks as soon as we are done auditing the revenue. But, some highlights....

Record number of new logo customers in the quarter - 50 brand new name customers...some big-4 replacements, some opensource to Nimsoft upgrade, some where no monitoring existed before.

Record revenue in the quarter (again)

Record MSP revenue, record number of new MSPs including replacements of several MSP specific products.

Great growth - even in this tough economy.

Our team is buzzing, just had multiple defections from the "Huge Prices" sales team in North America....welcome to the new guys.

I asked a industry analyst recently what BSM meant to them. They told me, tongue in cheek, "Brings Stacks of Money"....and then added "and low expectations". Most BSM projects cost a fortune ($500k plus), are very services intensive and few ever deliver upon the original expectations.

Sort of sounds like the Framework implementations of the late 90s, or the mega-suite/projects that companies continue to invest in (why are so many people closed minded to alternatives?)

Time for change I think.....

A CIO of a major bank recently told me "We've realized that we no longer have to spend the kind of money, time and people on the mediocre monitoring solutions and support that IBM, HP and the other large vendors often deliver. We know that there are now real alternatives that can deliver against our needs and Nimsoft is leading the way".

Exactly - just as we've done for monitoring - make it successful, accessible and justifiable - we are going to do for BSM.

I saw the beta version of our solution yesterday and I'm excited; built using a combination of the Nimsoft and the Indicative technology - it could be a game changer.

On my way to New Orleans right now for sales and technical training......

Isn't it amazing? So many pieces of business come down to the last day (i.e. tomorrow - New Year's Eve). Just like in the transfer market/free agent deadline in sports - everyone talks about it and negotiates for a long time, then we all rush to get it all done in the last 24 hours.

Fortunately, Nimsoft has managed to largely avoid the 'last second' rush this quarter. We've got almost all of the business done but, even so, we still have about 12 separate transactions that we are expecting tomorrow.

We are also doing our purchasing at the same time. We have to decide tomorrow whether to continue with Webex or Citrix for our online web conferencing - it's a close call, they can both do the job and both are highly respected companies.

We also invested in some new source control products today for our development organization - we decided to go with Accurev. This was also a close call but ultimately our development team felt that this was the best fit for us. I know that our engineers really wanted and needed this, so we made the investment today.

We've got the sales and technical teams coming together in a couple of weeks time for training. This is absolutely critical for us. We continue to strive to have the best and most highly respected sales and technical organizations in the business so regular training is a highly important part of that process for us.

What else? Going to the mountains some time tomorrow as soon as we've finished for the year - hoping to get off work a little early so that I can beat the traffic. Ski-ing until Sunday and then back to do the sales/technical meeting.

And finally, yes, we will be training our team on our new "BSM" offerings in a couple of weeks. Not sure about our plans for announcing this publicly - we will probably drip it out rather than big bang it. Sort of seems inappropriate to "big bang" anything at the moment when so many companies worldwide are struggling and individuals are losing their jobs although this is a big cost reducer.

Not sure I'll be doing too much blogging from the mountains but, for anyone that is interested, I am an absolutely terrible skier so I'm just hoping to return with myself and my entire family in one piece.

Happy New Year

Gary

We had a wonderful Christmas yesterday with the kids. They couldn't get off of Guitar Hero - the three kids on guitar, drums and mic was lots of fun.

As for me, well Santa brought me a Garmin GPS watch. Pretty clever stuff - it records when you go running and then wirelessly uploads it to the web and tells you how far, how many calories, the route that you ran etc. GPS in a watch. (Thanks to Mark Rivington for showing me this).

Business wise things have been very good. We have already signed a record number of new logo customers this quarter, surpassing our largest ever number that we set last quarter. We are also very close to our record bookings for the quarter as well. We have a lot more business that's still available to us - could be a busy few days next week - we're hoping to surpass all previous records, but we need a strong finish.

What about the economy? Well, definitely we've had business delayed - no doubt about that. But, from talking to many CEOs and advisors, everyone is saying that Q1 2009 is the first quarter of the "new" economy and nobody quite knows what to expect. Our business is very strong, and our sales funnels moving in to next year are very strong as well so I believe that we are well positioned.

Need to run - got to get ready for dinner tonight. Adult time....ahhhhhh

We are looking for a new PR agency at the moment - met with one of the two finalists today. The other one next week I think. More about that another time...can't let them know how they did just yet.

I also met with four company CEOs during the week that could be excellent partners for Nimsoft - each of them providing value-added but complimentary solutions to our core products. We obviously can't do them all, so I think we'll go and talk to some of our customers and see what they are interested in as their priorities

We won a large brand name customer in Europe today - I don't normally mention individual wins, but this one is one of the largest brand name companies in the world. Competed with those folks over at HP (although HP letting go their entire Inside Sales team half way through the evaluation probably didn't help - (I think that unless you are a "strategic account" - HP Software now push you to a channel partner whether you like it or not)

We also secured business with several new MSPs this week as well.

From the product side.....BSM, BSM, BSM.....the jungle drums are beating......coming soon......watch this space.....saw some of the pieces this morning.....

And....brand new version of our Nimsoft Server is just about to enter beta. Some pretty cool new functionality including dynamic thresholding and baselining - nice!

Better run

We are so, so busy. Lots of business being done this week - I think we may be breaking some records but I don't have time to look.

Just got a large piece of business with a leading financial institution (yes they are still spending), and another with a leading nationwide retailer. Had a great customer in Germany sign up earlier today, and several more in Scandinavia. Multiple new MSPs over the last couple of days as well.

The environment is tough, not making any bones about that. We just had one piece of business where we were selected, negotiated, fully through legal and contracts and at the 11th hour, someone put a freeze on the budget. And this is a F500 company!

It's at times like this that my head spins. I think about when this was a company that operated out of a single room in Burlingame with us taking it in turns to get each other coffee. And yet now, we appear to have sales executives, technical representatives and executives on planes everywhere.

We just had our first customer in Malaysia (an MSP) earlier this week as well as our Asian customer base grows.

Geez - what shall I get my girlfriend/partner for Christmas....she wants diamond earrings....anyone noticed that the price of diamonds doesn't seem to be affected by the recession? Who mentioned cartel.

How cute....my daughter's letter to Santa....

Had the chance to meet back up with some old friends as well as ex-employees when in London this week. Really good to do so and check back in and see what everyone is doing. Got a little scary as I was talking to one friend on mine and we were talking about how we used to work together 20 years ago!! We were working for Candle Corp at the time, who were a specialist vendor in mainframe performance monitoring software (since acquired by IBM). I joined because Candle had a policy of providing company cars in the UK and all my friends that worked there had brand new convertibles whilst I was driving a clapped out old banger on the salary of a systems programmer at a bank.

Managed to spend lots of time with both customers and potential customers. In fact, met with multiple Managed Service/Outsourcing/Hosting Providers during this trip - continues to become a bigger and bigger part of our business.

We had 21 deals close last week, which is good news as we move closer to the end of year and end of quarter. Some great new customers signing up....including a service provider to financial services in New York, a service provider to the oil industry in Texas, a European government agency, a telecoms company in the UK amongst others.

I happened to be staying at a reasonably nice hotel in London (amazing the deals you can get on the web when the economy is bad), and saw multiple "celebs" while there including Lewis Hamilton, Claudia Schiffer, Jonathon Ross and Amy Adams - not that I really care that much to be honest.

I'm "almost" done with the Christmas shopping for the kids but I can no longer blog about what I've got them, because they're old enough to figure out how to read the blog. But, should be fun on Xmas Eve with one of them on drums, one on guitar and one on the microphone.

Hmm....me thinks that dad needs to get the port and stilton ordered.

I'm exhausted. Need to get out of the office and get home. Put the Christmas tree up last weekend - and booked a few days in the mountains with the kids for early January. Back on the road again next week to Europe.

We are well and truly in to our end of quarter at the moment, which also happens to be our end of year - so doubly important. So far, things are gong well for the quarter - we're happy with where we are at. A big law firm moved to Nimsoft after struggling with a larger vendor for the last year, a major network service provider also moved to Nimsoft, multiple more Managed Service Providers, a CableTV company and many, many others.

From the product perspective, we have moved MySQL probe in to GA status recently and we have a new release of our Service Delivery Portal in GA as well. Incidentally, I spoke to a potential customer today and they told me that "Your dashboards are the slickest thing that we have ever seen. The ease and ability to create custom dashboards for the different lines of business is amazing". Nice hats off to the development team on that one.

Anyhow....we're excited about our BSM strategy - I get to see the first versions next week I am told, we have a ton of stuff cooking on monitoring Cloud environments where we are already way ahead of the curve (more to do of course), and it's just busy, busy, busy.

Sales kickoff in January to prepare for as well and I'm trying to decide whether to spend the money to do a new driveway on my home (exciting huh?).

Until next time....

Oh dear.....some survey answers coming from the Gartner conference in Las Vegas this week.

When asked to "grade" their Big4 supplier (CA, HP, IBM, BMC) for Availability and Performance Monitoring Tools...73% gave them a C, D or F!!! Yep, overall the average grade was a "C-", we think customers deserve better than this. Are you happy with a "C-"?

Top priority for attendees for Availability and Performance Monitoring......Cost Reduction - no surprise there.

Gartner has repeated multiple times that "None of the Big 4 will deliver on their vision"

The first thing that I would say about HP's pricing is not just that it is unbelievably high, but that it is unbelievably complicated. I used to work for a CEO once that told me that "pricing had to be complicated so that customers did not understand it and therefore could not get the best deal".

We, at Nimsoft, take the opposite approach.....count the number of servers, divide them into app servers, MS servers and file/print servers and, voila.....that's the pricing. Easy to do business with is an understatement. Opex? Fine. Capex? Fine. We'll work with you the way that YOUR business needs us to.

I have had a chance to talk to many both ex and current HP Software employees, and I'm still trying to find the person that actually understands their pricing (apparently there are at least 2 people worldwide that can explain the HP pricelist).

Nice headline from Joe over at MSPMentor.....

HP?s Double Migraine: Nimsoft and GroundWork Open Source
Posted November 25th, 2008 by Joe Panettieri

On CNET yesterday....
HP tries to hide its pricing from customers and open-source competitors
Posted by Matt Asay


On October 13, 2008, Hewlett-Packard (HP) sent a complaint to an open-source competitor, GroundWork, asking GroundWork to stop revealing HP's "confidential" pricing. I have posted the letter below. What HP isn't correcting is GroundWork's contention that HP's IT monitoring software is considerably more expensive than that of its open-source competition.

Does HP think its pricing is really a secret? It's publicly available at GSA Advantage (albeit most GSA pricing actually reflects discounting of roughly 10 percent). Guess what? HP software costs a lot of money. Is anyone surprised?

GroundWork has been highlighting its cost advantages over HP's Operations Manager and Network Node Manager offerings for some time, declaring an 82-percent cost advantage over HP's products. This isn't news.

So why is HP sending letters to GroundWork (and InformationWeek, which hosted a webinar on the subject), demanding that its pricing be buried? According to a source familiar with the matter, it was apparently GroundWork's live webcast (registration here) on September 30, 2008, which roughly a dozen HP employees attended, that seriously rankled HP.

Why? Perhaps because the data presented starkly reveals just how pricey software like HP's can be.

As noted above, HP does not claim the pricing GroundWork revealed is wrong. It simply seeks to prevent disclosure of pricing, as well as attempts to police HP's own network of customers, partners and even employees. From the letter sent to GroundWork and InformationWeek:

During [the webinar] you referenced the Hewlett-Packard Company's ("HP") pricing and listed in your slide set the "HP Software BTO Pricing Guide, 2008" as the source of such information. HP's Pricing Guide is confidential information, is marked as such, and is not publicly available. Access to HP pricing information is limited to parties under confidentiality obligations to HP.

Fine. There are very valid reasons for maintaining such confidentiality provisions, but the fact of the matter is that GroundWork could easily have pulled the pricing information from the GSA Advantage website (and probably should have). The problem isn't the pricing information. It's that HP doesn't want its high prices used against it.

Is HP afraid of transparency? Presumably it can justify those high prices, so why is it worried? Here's the letter in its entirety. You be the judge.

Some quick Nimsoft updates for everyone....

The quarter is progressing well. The economy is of course a little scary but so far we're seeing business doing very well. A down economy is not necessarily a bad thing for Nimsoft given our focus on cost savings and value.

I took a look this week at our largest ten prospects this quarter, and 5 out of the 10 are big-4 replacement opportunities with 4 being HP replacements and 1 an IBM replacement.

HP have clearly taken the mantle as our #1 replaced vendor - customers tell us that they are very unhappy with the complexity of the product, their support is absolutely abysmal and customers are no longer willing to spend the kind of $$ on software and services.

Our new VP Sales is doing really well. Our "dream team" of two of the most senior Mercury Interactive sales leaders should position us really well for the future.

I'm on the road all next week (I don't get thanksgiving), New York for a meeting with a large customer then London, Brussels and Amsterdam. I am meeting with 13 potential customers next week - that European sales team has me busy. But....there is nothing I'd rather be doing business wise than sitting in front of customers.

Special bonus for me, I get to spend Friday night back with my parents in England before returning to California next weekend.

I'll blog from the road, would love to talk a little more about our Business Service Management plans for early in the New Year, our Cloud Computing plans (which we have a tremendous offering for) and a number of other things that are up our sleeves.

Off to try and find a birthday present for my lady now......she doesn't understand the word "recession" :)

This was in Computer Weekly this week in the UK (for the US, Building Society = Savings and Loans)


Case Study: Nottingham Building Society strengthens IT and business links

Author:
Cath Jennings
Posted:
12:15 05 Nov 2008

Nottingham Building Society is in the process of adopting a business-oriented approach to service level management, which will link the performance of IT systems and services directly to business activities.

The decision to move in this direction was taken by IT director Jack Cutts, who was taken on by the firm about two-and-a-half years ago to update its core mortgage systems.

Initial work involved stabilising existing systems before undertaking a complete IT infrastructure refresh, which included introducing systems management products for the first time.

"There was no monitoring in the organisation at all, so the only time we knew there was an issue was when users or customers told us. But we've got finite resources to spend on IT and we wanted to move the balance away from support-and-fix to adding value. So we felt that the more proactive we could be about things, the more effective that shift would be," Cutts says.

As a result the building society, which employs more than 500 staff, rolled out service level management (SLM) applications from Nimsoft and built a graphical dashboard to pictorially represent 12 monitoring areas, one of which included the firms 32 branches.

The next stage in the process, however, will be to introduce business-driven service level agreements (SLAs) based on asking senior business managers 10 key questions about how they wish their IT services to be delivered. Topics will include 'are the right systems available when you need them to be?' and 'are support staff courteous?'.

Cutts explains the rationale, "If I ask the head of marketing, for example, are you happy with your systems being available 99.99 per cent of the time, they'll probably say 'yes'. But if I say 'so it's OK if I take the system down every 13 days for an hour at 12pm?', they're not likely to be so happy."

The problem with SLAs in this context, he says, is that they "sometimes drive the wrong behaviours and if they're too top level, they could be causing customer dissatisfaction." This is not least because "if you ask the business what level of availability they want, they won't necessarily understand the question. So you can pick something that makes you look successful, but that takes away trust".

Moreover, he adds, while "you can create statistics to prove anything, it doesn't mean you're providing a good service or that the customer thinks you're doing a good job". As a result, the questions are intended to act as a discussion point to enable "each department to create their own way of assessing whether we are doing a good job".

"We have numbers around things like availability to help them make the call, but sometimes it's the softer stuff that you don't get to hear about. So if we're getting six out of 10 from one department, we can ask them what their issues are and drive up the SLAs as they become more focused and targeted," Cutts explains.

The openness of the discussion process, he believes, will, in turn, help to create better relationships between the business and IT. "If they're consistently giving you a low mark, they have to justify that, but if they mark us 10 out of 10 each time, they can't really complain. But it's not about a numbers game, it's about making things better," he says.

Cutts warns, however, that it is only possible to adopt such an approach if the IT department is providing a good basic service and has suitable monitoring tools in place. He also believes that the IT team needs to be provided with incentives to carry through on any changes.

"I'm putting SLA performance into my personal objectives and that of my team because if they're not linked in, there's no reason to engage. It shows my real commitment to this approach as I don't feel that you can do this kind of thing half-heartedly," he concludes.

Great blog from one of our customers..

http://www.enkiconsulting.net/blog/the-role-of-remote-monitoring-in-cloud-computing.html

We won an award the other night...Delloite Fastest Growing companies in Silicon Valley - we were 24th.

We also won the San Francisco Business Times award for fastest growing companies in the Bay Area.

Maybe marketing is going to press release these, not sure yet.

Really happy that we've got our new VP Sales on board for the Americas. Dixon joins us from HP Software, where he ended up as part of the acquisition of Mercury. It's the Mercury experience that we really like with Dixon as that was a dynamic, fast moving, rapidly growing company. Our customers can expect to be talking to him very soon - he's a huge customer advocate and loves getting involved.

Ran a $600m sales operation at HP, so hopefully he can scale to our needs for a few years :)

I couldn't be happier with Dixon.

As anyone that knows me knows, I have made some bad hires in the past. All I can tell the folks that work for Nimsoft is that I'm human, I make mistakes, but I recognize them quickly and fix them!

Welcome Dixon....time to make some noise.

Sorry for the delay, but these are finally out today (getting organized after the Goldman investment takes a little time).

Another outstanding set of results, led by very strong managed service provider revenue.

40 brand new logo customers (equaling the record set last quarter), and overall 30% new order growth (we had a very strong comparable in Q3 2007, with 2 of our largest ever contracts closed).

Best of everything though was the subscription revenue, more than doubling year on year. This is the revenue that is primarily driven by MSPs and shows the amazing growth of our MSP business.

We are now up to 720-730 customers worldwide and are looking forward to continuing the momentum.

Sorry for the lack of action on this blog. Been pretty tied up with (a) Deciding on our reaction to the economy (b) Getting through our first board meeting with our new investors (c) Traveling to New Orleans and then Amsterdam for our User Conferences and finally (d) Now I'm back in town, I'm sick!!

Anyhow....let's talk....

Excitement....our new VP Americas starts next week, oh joy of joys. It's a big name individual and another defection from what used to be a great company (Mercury) and is now HP Software. Cannot announce officially of course until next week but we are really excited to have him on board.

Economy....we've decided to watch our costs in some areas. This is not a reflection of actual business which has continued to be very strong (Q3 results announced soon, I promise!) but more a precautionary measure because of everything that all the analysts and experts are telling us. We've actually had a very good start to Q4, and the sales forecasts are really strong but, as I say, we cannot ignore all the advice that's being given that spending will slow, it would be irresponsible of us to do so.

User Conferences...very well attended in both Europe and the US. Had Gartner presenting in the US and Forrester in Europe together with multiple customer presentations. Really interesting to listen to the online brokerage that presented, their business has "gone through the roof" over the last few weeks - they keep hitting new record trading days. It's good to know that someone is doing well out of this mess and not just the bankruptcy lawyers.

Goldman Sachs - yes, we closed the investment at exactly the right time for Nimsoft before the market went completely mad and we are really, really pleased with the value that Goldman are already bringing to the table. This is a significant step for Nimsoft.

Also, a major analyst that uses Nimsoft for all their internal IT monitoring needs emailed me about how unbelievable our support was during a recent major event that they held. This is the best kind of present that I get - unsolicited emails singling out people or just praising the company on what we do for our customers. (I hope they tell their analysts!)

Talking of presents, my kids starting building their Christmas lists this week. Can you believe it...it's October. My son wants an electronic keyboard, Spore, a MacBook, and the iTunes DJ software. My daughter wants a new guitar and TV in her room (preferably a High School Musical one - I went to see HSM3 this week).

Oh well, at least I know that they will change their minds a hundred times between now and Christmas and if they don't, well dad will have to help them change.

Shall we talk about Cloud computing? Because everybody else is. Next time maybe.

Funny that this acquisition has really not garnered much press - bigger things happening in the world maybe.

But, someone asked me my opinion on this as it effects Nimsoft earlier, so I thought I'd share...

By the way, as with everything on this blog, it's just an opinion - so please don't get bent out of shape if I say something you disagree with.

I think that what Managed Objects deliver and what Nimsoft deliver is very different. MO do not do any data collection ? they are a presentation layer that sits on top of other monitoring products to bring things into a Business Service perspective. One of the issues with this approach is that it is very expensive (layering more cost on top of existing cost), very ?services heavy? - large amounts of services to implement and administer and all the customer transactions are ?big deals? - which come under more scrutiny and is more difficult to compete with the large incumbents. E.g. If I already use BMC for monitoring why not add BMC?s BSM solutions rather than going with another vendor? This is I think why Managed Objects has struggled to grow their business.

This is exactly why Nimsoft acquired Indicative. We recognize that customers want to drive budget reductions not budget increases, we recognize that yes, customers want to achieve BSM but they don?t want to spend millions of dollars in software and services to do so. We recognize that the reason that BSM has not gained greater adoption is that it is only the ?top few? that can afford it.

Nimsoft?s approach has been to start at the monitoring and data collection layer, making things simple and reducing cost. Then, moving up in to dashboards and Service Level Monitoring and then, with the Indicative acquisition, moving in to BSM. But....when we announce our BSM offering (early 2009), it will be an offering that will dramatically reduce the TCO of BSM solutions ? it will be a market changer in much the same way that NimBUS has changed the market for monitoring solutions.

Nothing announced yet....but you heard it here first. Should be announced soon.

One less BSM player....

Let me do the good news first. Our user conference in New Orleans was a great success - we heard from multiple of our customers how they were using the Nimsoft products to achieve value, and many of those customers presented on the big stage - some managed service providers and some end users.

Thanks to all our US (and Japanese) customers that came and supported this event - now on to Amsterdam. (Someone suggested that we should link it to the Renaissance...cool idea.)

Now on to the economy....do we ever learn? Did you see the presentation from Sequoia CEO conference (happy to send you the links if you like). They are very, very concerned and have advised their portfolio companies to conserve cash, cut costs wherever possible.

Nimsoft is very well positioned given the strength of our business combined with the recent investment from Goldman Sachs but we also want to be conservative. We're looking at "slowing down the growth" (we've actually been looking at this for a few months anyhow) and ensuring that we're as efficient as we can be. I got my first email yesterday from someone who's company has not managed to raise new money and are now in trouble...Nimsoft is well positioned to take advantage of these opportunities.

Finally, I saw this opening quote from the Gartner conference in Florida this week...

?A financial era is ending. This age of conspicuous consumption is over, and the age of conspicuous frugality starts now,? said Whit Andrews, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. ?The world has changed, and your role, as an IT leader must change as well.?

My only question is....where was I during the period of conspicuous consumption?

I thought that ended in 2000 - we have certainly never gone back there!

On a plane to New Orleans tomorrow....

Our name for the user conference this year is the Big Easy. Not very original given the location of New Orleans but we felt it reflected our product and its ease of use pretty well - "finally an alternative to the Big-4 - the Big-Easy" <<
But...here's the thing. The European user conference is in two weeks time and is in Amsterdam. So...what can we call it?

I'm sure there could be some interesting ideas given the location but I'm looking for help. Anyone got any ideas....feel free to add them as comments if you do.

If we get a killer/fun idea I'll personally send someone a bottle of something.

Goldman Sachs Leads $12 Million Investment in Nimsoft

Fastest Growing Systems Management Company Announces Second Round of Funding

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. ? October 7, 2008 ? Nimsoft, the fastest growing systems management company, today announced that the company has completed a funding round of $12 million led by new investor Goldman Sachs with follow on investments from Series A investors JMI Equity and Northzone Ventures. The company will use the funds to continue its growth and help achieve its vision of becoming the world?s leading enterprise systems management software company.

?Nimsoft has an innovative, well-run business model with a strong management team,? said David Campbell, Vice President, Principal Investment Area, Goldman Sachs. ?To operate modern data centers, it is critical for IT customers to have robust systems management software that is easy to deploy and maintain to ensure they are providing the right level of service to their businesses. Nimsoft has a proven track record of delivering this functionality to both large and small enterprises and managed service providers (MSPs) around the world. We are pleased to invest in Nimsoft to enable further growth as a leading enterprise systems management provider.?

?Despite the tough economic times, we were overwhelmed with interest from multiple prestigious investors,? said Gary Read, president and CEO of Nimsoft. ?An investment from Goldman Sachs is further recognition of the strength of our business model, product performance and future business opportunity. With the global market experience and formidable resources of Goldman Sachs added to the existing knowledge of our initial investors JMI Equity and Northzone Ventures, we are confident we will continue to grow a highly successful business.?

According to Gartner Dataquest, the worldwide revenue for IT operations management software was $12.9 billion in 2007, representing 13.5 percent annual growth.1 Nimsoft extended its position in the Gartner ?Magic Quadrant for IT Event Correlation and Analysis, 2007? and has expanded to 700 customers in 30 countries. With revenue growth of 534 percent over the past four years, Nimsoft is the fastest growing systems management company in the world due largely to its easy-to-use performance and availability monitoring software that offers a fast and compelling Return on Investment.

An InformationWeek product review ranked Nimsoft the ?Best of the Best? among nine application performance management (APM) solutions. APM is a critical segment of systems management because it monitors the performance of the customer experience ? in addition to core IT infrastructure performance. InformationWeek reviewers noted Nimsoft was ?a real leader? in service level management for its ?flexible and robust SLA reporting engine? and ability to ?report SLA performance granularly ? which many APM tools are unable to do.?

Lead Goldman Sachs investor David Campbell will join the Nimsoft board of directors and provide strategic counsel for the company?s ongoing development and growth. Peter Arrowsmith of JMI Equity and Torleif Ahlsand of Northzone Ventures will continue to serve on the Nimsoft board of directors.

In a bad economy, what happens to the vendors? Who wins, who loses? Where do customers go for value yet security?

First, let's talk about the big guys? They like to go elephant hunting...they need to win big, big deals because the expectations are so high from their investors. But...the elephants start to disappear in a down economy (it's the big deals that get scrutinized and canceled by the CFO first). So the mega-vendors try to get aggressive on price to compete for smaller budgets but...these vendors have a fundamental problem...their products require tons of services and support, which means no matter how low the software price is, the cost of ownership is still very, very high and cannot be reduced.

Surely then customers go to smaller vendors where they can typically reduce their costs and reduce their budgets? Well yes and no. One of the issues with the small vendors in a down market is that many of them don't survive. They cannot drive the revenue to make them profitable, the investors don't have the appetite to keep adding to their investment and so they end up being sold off cheaply.

So, where does the customer go to (1) Reduce their costs but (2) Keep their risk to a minimum.

The answer is that customers still need to find the smaller vendors to be able to reduce their costs and cut budgets, but they also need to ensure that their vendors are well funded, have good investors for the long term and have good established customer bases and recurring revenue streams from multiple different types of customers.

More tomorrow....

Anyone checked out the MSPmentor list of top 100 MSPs

Guess what? We have signed 2 of the top 10 MSPs on that list as brand new customers in the last few weeks. In both cases we replaced other solutions. More info later as we get permission to reference their names.

Our MSP business is as strong as ever (more so), and, 2 days before the end of the quarter, Nimsoft continues to be incredibly successful. I "think" Friday was our most successful day ever in our history.

The economy sucks but that makes it even more important to gain rapid value from investments.

Oops, our marketing guys are going to hate me again, but we've just won an award for being one of the 50 fastest growing companies in Silicon Valley. We're not sure where we ranked yet, need to attend a dinner to find that out. Then we can issue a press release.

But...can you imagine that....we are in an area dominated by fast growing tech and bio-tech companies and Nimsoft is in the top-50!!!

Huge thank you to our customers, partners and employees for making this happen.

By the way....anyone that reads this....we are hiring and have lots of open positions.

Over the weekend two surprising events happened in sports. The Patriots, the most dominant team in American Football over the last several seasons got thrashed by the worst team. For the Europeans, think about Manchester United getting beaten 5-0 by Leyton Orient.

Also, the highly fancied and stronger European Ryder cup team got well beaten by the Americans.

Interesting watching the post-match interviews....in both cases representatives of the losing teams made the same statement about the victors ?they wanted it more, simple as that!?

Lessons for us all.....winning takes many characteristics but most importantly it is about the will and the desire to win. That is why Nimsoft is such a tremendous company and why we beat competitors that, have far greater resources available to them.

The will to win is irresistible ? if you have it then you will win.

We LOVE our customers, their success with our product is personal for us, and our customers see, feel and witness that.

Well, Nimsoft was a day late and a dollar short to get included in the announcement from VMWorld today (even we can't be perfect you know).

But, suffice it to say that we will be moving immediately to get our solutions certified as part of the new VMware Ready Program. We've already submitted the forms so we should be able to get this done pretty quickly.

Funny really, we're probably one of the most widely used products for monitoring/mgmt of the VMware environment - just need to be quicker on the mark from a marketing perspective.

Next time...

The following article just appeared in the San Francisco Business Times - it could be a little embarrassing in certain areas but then again, it's not like I'm a politician or something. Have fun...

Friday, September 5, 2008
Gary Read

Co-founder, president and CEO, Nimsoft
San Francisco Business Times


HQ: Redwood City.
2007 revenue: $35 million.
Employees: 165.
Founded: 2002.
Source of startup capital: Personal savings and, in 2007, $10.3 million from JMI Equity and Northzone Ventures.
Background: Born and raised in a suburb of London. Worked a paper route to buy first computer, graduated from high school and started as a programmer for Mastercard. After a series of IT jobs, including stints at Riversoft and BMC, founded Converse Software in 2002, which merged with Nimbus Software in 2004 to form Nimsoft.
Age: 41.
Residence: Los Gatos.
Web site: nimsoft.com.
What it does: IT infrastructure monitoring.
Big picture

Reason for starting business: I?ve always wanted to start my own business.
Biggest plus of ownership: To be able to build something I can be proud of, but also to have control over things.
Biggest drawback: Stress. I take personally the success of the company.
Biggest misconception: Once you?ve got the business to a certain level, people automatically think you suddenly become very wealthy and work less. It?s quite the reverse.
Biggest business strength: We have a hard work ethic.
Biggest business weakness: I really don?t know how to acknowledge my own limitations.
Biggest risk: Buying Indicative Software in April. We?ve never done an acquisition before, and it?s complicated, but it has gone well.
Biggest mistake: I?ve made some pretty big mistakes in people I?ve hired; it sets you back.
Smartest move: Making the decision to merge with Nimbus and the selection of our investors ? it?s been tremendous.
Biggest worry: Used to be meeting payroll. Maintaining focus as we get larger is what we?re working on now.
Top source of inspiration: Many things. But I?m a very self-motivated person.
Daily routine

Most challenging task: Keeping everyone on the same page.
Favorite task: Talking to and visiting customers. It?s the best thing.
Least favorite task: Firing people. It?s probably the worst thing.
Biggest frustration: There?s always more that you can do. You can never do everything you want.
Source of support in a business crisis: It can be lonely being CEO, but friends and former colleagues listen and give me advice.
Dreams

Key goal yet to achieve: I?d like Nimsoft to be publicly traded.
First move with capital windfall: I love cars, so I?d probably buy a new Aston Martin.
Five-year plan: To grow dramatically and become the leading company in the industry.
Inducement to sell: I don?t think it?s going to happen anytime soon.
First choice for new career or venture: I have a ton of ideas for new businesses, it?s all about building something.
Personals

Most-admired entrepreneur: (Virgin founder) Richard Branson, of course.
Most interested in meeting: I?m boring, but I?d like to meet Steve Jobs.
Stress reducers: Running, it?s good thinking time.
Favorite pastimes: I have three kids.
Favorite book: Classic English reads like Thomas Harding or Jane Austen.
Favorite films: (Anything with) James Bond.
Favorite restaurant: (Anyplace) with nachos.
Favorite destination: Best city in the world is London, only when the weather is good.
What?s on my iPod: A lot of high-energy dance music, it gets me going.
What I Drive: A 2006 gold Prius.

?Tony C. Yang

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.

We again had an amazing quarter ending in June. The company hit its aggressive growth targets both in terms of revenue but also new customer wins.

I spent the last couple of days in Europe with the sales team, and thought I'd share a couple of customer emails that were presented by one of the European sales reps as "Why I bought NimBUS" - these are from two Managed Service Providers. I want to point out one thing that both customers mention....which is the SUPPORT and KNOWLEDGE of our technical team. Well done - this is exactly who we strive to be.

First customer...

1 Integrated SLM platform

2 Ease of deployment

3 Mid Market suitability

4 Flexibility & Support of Nimsoft

5 Integration capability with our existing toolset

Second customer...

1 Extremely well informed and able support team (in comparison to N-Able. Kaseya etc) ? who were contactable and responsive

2 Perception that this is a product that allows us to pitch at a higher level (other platforms definitely targeting SME Market)

Means that our ?story? is so much more compelling to larger customers

3 Perception that Nimsoft are actually able and willing to help with installation & Customisation if required ? again driven from feedback that the technical contacts at Nimsoft ?really? understand their product and how it fits.

4 Persistent yet professional Sales/account Management, who took the time to come to site

5 Pricing means that even though nimbus is still more expensive than the previously mentioned vendors, It is within reach at a sensible price.

We are deep in to our end of quarter. It continues to amaze me quite how much business we get done in the last week of every quarter. We will do more this week than for the previous 12 weeks combined.

Today also happens to be my birthday (clearly my parents didn't understand end of quarter sales issues) and it's the big one.....the big four oh! We ate lots of English food yesterday in celebration....sausage rolls, pickled onions, pork pies....much to the amusement of my American friends (but actually they all liked the food).

Back to bizness, there was a great paper published by Gartner recently that talks about the pros and cons of agent-based monitoring versus non-agent based monitoring and concludes that, for most environments a combination is the best approach. I will pull out some extracts from the paper and put them on this blog next time.

There is also a good article from The 451 Group, that discusses how it is likely that the Open Source players in our space will likely get swallowed up by the big-four....much like Big Brother did by Quest several years ago. That's a big warning bell for anyone thinking of investing in Open Source for Systems/Network Monitoring....you are very vulnerable.

Gotta run....

BMC announced today that they are acquiring ProActivenet. From what I know of ProActivenet, they are a good company that has been around for quite a while.

But, they have struggled somewhat to find a niche and have had to take a lot of VC investment as, from what I understand, their business has been inconsistent. Maybe BMC is a good home for them.

I very nearly joined them many years ago, spending a lot of time interviewing with their CEO, Ajay Singh. He is an extremely accomplished and pleasant individual and I wish him and his entire team best of luck.

Meanwhile, I guess this is just another product for BMC customers to understand and make sense of where it fits.

PS For ProactiveNet employees.....Nimsoft has lots of vacancies in all areas. Come on up the Peninsula and join us - we're much more fun than BMC! :)

Quick question - anyone notice the similarity in this:

NetIQ press release - March 27th
"Zero-touch" remote deployment of agents and Knowledge Scripts?, eliminating manual installation and upgrade.

Nimsoft press release - February 12th

No Touch NimBUS delivers on the next stage of the Nimsoft vision of having a completely zero administration SLM solution.

Oh well...it is well known that imitation is the best form of flattery. I'd like to thank NetIQ for the compliment and realizing that Nimsoft is rapidly becoming the new leader in this market.

We have a lot of discussion about pricing for VMWare or other virtualized environments - probably the same as most other software companies.

By way of background, Nimsoft provides a very complete monitoring solution for VMWare. We can interface with Virtual Center and pull the information out, but we also provide agent-based monitoring on the virtual machines themselves and we also have the ability to bypass Virtual Center if the customer does not wish to license VC and have access to all the same information.

Anyhow, on to pricing....

There are a couple of ways to price a product like ours for server monitoring. We could price:

a) Per instance of the operating system
or
b) Per the size of the physical server (including # of processors etc)

We have always chosen to price per OS rather than on the size of the server itself. Our feeling has always been that customers really dislike having to count the number of processors in each server and license on a per processor basis. This gets even more confusing with the advent of multi-core processors (dual today and quad coming) ? I believe that Oracle are pricing on a ?per core? basis.

For us, we have been prepared to ?leave money on the table? in return for simplified customer administration. Excellent customer satisfaction is always top of the agenda.

Some tell us that our pricing should be lower or free for virtual server machine monitoring compared to physical server monitoring. Our software is doing exactly the same job, providing exactly the same (if not more) value and running on exactly the same operating system whether it is a virtual or a physical server ? so I find that argument to be difficult to understand fully.

Of course, this is a view that is perpetuated by VMWare themselves as it provides a greater ROI on the VMWare investment (although it?s interesting to see that VMWare charge based on # of processors and limit their licenses to quad-core). ***Thanks to Eric Miller at Genesis Multimedia Solutions who helped me correct a previous post on this***

So, we feel our pricing is fair and is customer friendly. As with anything, we are always open to discuss other pricing models with our customers and if we need to change things then we will.

I saw one of our customers had commented on the article that Mike Vizard at eWeek had published as follows....

"I liked Nimbus so much I bought the software..." 5/2/2007 9:57:35 PM

Good column Michael. As you know Alvaka has used more management tools commercially than most people can name. Nimsoft is the winner for us hands down.

I agree that "only providing rudimentary remote monitoring services as the core element" managed service is very limiting and often of little value to clients. That is why we like Nimsoft so much. It provides us an opportunity to provide so much more value to our clients. The Nimbus software affords us to manage the complete user experience and not just monitor a few meaningless server performance statistics.

Oli Thordarson
CEO
Alvaka Networks

The full article can be seen here

This may be a shameless plug, but we are in the middle of our "Best Practices in Managed Services" seminar series and so far it's going incredibly well with feedback being that this is a wonderful educational exercise for up and coming MSPs.

Our customers are so passionate about what we are doing for and with them that several of them are now starring in their very own videos.

Berbee (part of CDW) are one of the leading MSPs in the Mid-west if not the country - you can see what they have to say here.

Alvaka Networks are based in Southern California and have a tremendous reputation with their customers. You can see what their CEO has to say here.

And finally, Charles Weaver, President of the independent industry association the "MSPAlliance", talks about Managed Services here.

Thanks to each of these individuals for taking the time to do this. For all of our other customers that have requested to do the same....watch this space....our video crew will be out with you soon.

Great mention by Mike Vizard in Channel Insider this week as well.

Sorry! I have been so busy that I've not been updating this blog as often as I would want. Let me do a quick summary of what we've been up to....

First we had a GREAT Q1. We grew revenues 83% from the prior year and continued to have excellent customer satisfaction and new customer sign-ups. We hired our 100th employee last week (we're already at 105).

During the first week of April we took the entire sales team offsite for training. This included external and internal instructors and was very well done. We invest heavily in training for all of our employees and will continue to do so.

The second week of April, I took a few days off to spend with my kids. My 6 year old son is officially now braver than I am on roller coasters, in fact he laughs at my nervousness (and he's only 6!). Meanwhile our technical team spent the week in Oslo with the engineers which I am led to believe was also excellent technical training.

This week, I'm in England. Board meeting yesterday and then last night, I took our lead investor to the Chelsea vs Liverpool Champions League semi-final. This was an amazing experience for him (a US guy that has never before been to an English football match).

Meanwhile, we had our product council meetings this week where we regularly meet to discuss product direction. We have some amazing things coming along and I know that our customers will continue to be really happy. Business is great!

Tomorrow I get to go home. Before then I have a customer meeting, an analyst call and a press meeting to attend.

Meanwhile fingers crossed that Virgin upgrade me in the morning on the long flight back to San Francisco.

More soon...

We are here again - the final week of our quarter, which makes for very little sleep for many of our team. For some (including myself) this is caused by us negotiating and agreeing purchases with many customers that choose to wait until now to place their order. For others (the sales reps that are trying to make their number) this is caused by sleepless nights worrying about whether they have done everything possible to ensure that customers can purchase before the end of quarter hits on Friday.

We are again having a great quarter and a great last month. So far in March, we have concluded 45 separate transactions with customers and are signing many new customers on to the NimBUS platform.

I met with a potential customer last week in San Francisco who asked us the differences between Nimsoft and a competitor. Rather than focus on feature/function I instead talked about a couple of key areas:

1. Nimsoft and its team "eats, sleeps and breathes" enterprise management. Unlike some others who jump into the market in order to make a quick buck, our engineering team has been developing these tools for over 15 years and we know the common pitfalls that face these platforms. On the surface it's easy right? Read data from published APIs, put it into a database and write a nice, sexy GUI to display it. Well....the issues come in when the conversation turns to security models, how to support heterogeous environments, firewalls, NATed IP addresses, scalability, fault tolerance etc etc. Then, a seemingly simple problem becomes an extremely difficult problem. Many of the new entrants into this market simply "don't know what they don't know" and ultimately their customers will suffer as they hit the wall.

2. Our support for customers is unparalleled. Our marketing team asked me to describe this the other day, and I used the "No customer left behind" phrase. All companies have difficult customers, all companies have to deal with that 1 or 2% of customers that have previously unknown requirements that they need met. Quite often these individual customers become unprofitable in their own right. But...we have NEVER walked away from a customer. I shouldn't say that too loud because maybe our financial guys might suggest that we should in fact walk away if a customer becomes unprofitable for us. But, it is not in our genes I'm afraid. We build this business on customer satisfaction and we hold good to our promise - no exceptions.

At the start of April we have our ww sales team together for 4 days for sales training (yep, they get on a plane on Saturday and training starts Sunday morning). This gives me a slight problem because we need to present the plaque to our sales rep of the quarter on Monday morning, and yet we will not know until Friday night who that person is. The engraver needs 3 days lead time. So...yes, we are going to produce multiple plaques and the ones that don't make it will never be used. Don't tell the sales team my secret - I think they believe that I am very clever in predicting who is going to be the #1 rep.

Second week of April, our entire technical team (apart from some customer support staff of course) head to Oslo for a week with our developers for in-depth technical training. This will be an amazing experience for many of them (hands up who has ever been to Oslo?)

These events cost Nimsoft quite a lot, but it is all part of investing in our people and ultimately our customer satisfaction.

Today we announced a partnership with Oracle. Rather than me repeat what is in the press release, maybe I can explain a little further the background to this announcement.

Oracle has a product - Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g (OEM). This product, from my perspective has traditionally been used by Oracle customers to better manage their Oracle database environment. It does not compete with NimBUS but quite often it is already being used by the DBAs in our customers. However, Oracle feels that this product can handle much more than just the Oracle database ennvironment and instead this can be a complete applications management solution.

They already have (or are announcing) support for their own suite of applications such as the Oracle Apps, Siebel, Peoplesoft etc.

But...there are also 35,000-40,000 customers that are running SAP R/3 with Oracle. Customers that are running OEM in this environment, naturally want it to be able to monitor the SAP R/3 information as well as the database.

So, Oracle approached Nimsoft about taking our SAP R/3 solution and making it a "plug-in" to OEM.

The work to do this is actually pretty easy because of the openness of NimBUS and the full set of APIs that we provide. We are working with the Oracle engineers to develop this integration and work is well underway.

What are the implications of this announcement?

For Nimsoft, we are being recognized by one of the leading software companies in the world and clearly this is great validation of our product and what we are doing, plus we get Oracle sales staff and partners starting to recommend NimBUS.

For Oracle and Oracle customers, they get an immediate SAP R/3 monitoring capability.

In the future, we would hope to expand this relationship to cover all of the NimBUS probes for other application/database/network/server environments that OEM does not currently cover.

But...we need to walk before we can run.

Exciting times. CRN leaked a little of the news early on their blog

We are now once again into the last month of the quarter. For anyone that doesn't work at a software company, you should know that we pretty much do not allow any vacation/holiday in the last month of any quarter as it gets extremely busy. Our revenue numbers so far in Q1 are looking great and we've had many new customer wins yet again.

Next week we are announcing a partnership with one of the leading software companies in the world. They have selected Nimsoft to deliver the management/monitoring of SAP R/3. It's a very exciting time for us - being recognized as a technology leader by one of the largest software companies in the world.

On a different note, I talked to one of our customers this week who had, about a year ago, selected NimBUS instead of HP Openview which was his company's previous standard. I asked him "What was the hardest part of the decision making process?"

His response...

"The technical decision was easy, your product is not even comparable to OpenView - we pretty much knew we wanted NimBUS right away. The economic decision was also easy - your total project price was less than the consultancy price we were offered from HP. The support that you showed was also superior. But...the hard part was convincing my peers and managers that we should purchase from a smaller company as opposed to a very large organization like HP."

I asked him "1 year on" what the feeling was and he told me that he had been promoted partially as a result of his "bold" decision and the success of the project.

I will add to this thought process soon because it truly amazes me how many companies are willing to allow their business to suffer because of their vendors. Tail wagging the dog.

But, right now it is Saturday afternoon and I have to get my son's hair cut, buy a present for my daughter to take to a birthday party this evening and I also promised some Pokemon cards to my little angels.

What a fun day. I left the office at 2pm California time on Monday and finally arrived into Oslo airport at 5pm on Tuesday.

But, just to "twist the knife", I then waited about 1.5 hours for my luggage. Seems to pale into comparison to the JetBlue experience from the other week, but even so, I'm sure steam was seen coming from my ears.

The rest of this week is spent in product direction meetings, a board meeting tomorrow, a key customer call on Thursday and an interview for a European Southern Regional Manager at Heathrow airport on Friday morning before catching a plane back to San Francisco.

Weather right now in Oslo is 28 F (feels like 22F) with light snow falling and lots of snow on the ground.

Yep - it's freezing.

Figured that everyone else was talking about them, so why not me?

Thinking about whether this impacts our business....for us this is not about Google Apps versus Office - I'm not sure that I know of too many people that are willing to go to a 100% offline model for Word Processing etc. Even the flag bearer of SaaS, salesforce.com has an "offline edition" so that users can access the critical parts of the application when the network is not available - basically anyone that has to travel.

But...what about Exchange? Why would users still need to buy a hosted exchange service when they could use Gmail with their own mail domain? Outlook works perfectly well against Gmail, so, apart from calendar sharing (of which we use salesforce.com anyhow) why do I need Exchange?

At this point, Nimsoft is just about to sign a contract for a service provider to host our Exchange solution - the 3 year cost will be about $250,000 compared to Gmail for 3 years which would be about $20,000.

So, I'm going to ask our IT manager to tell me where the extra $230,000 of value is in Exchange compared to premier Gmail? Maybe it is there but I need someone to educate me.

Can someone help?

The press tour was a wonderful success. Big articles in Network World and eWeek.

Our customer was quoted as saying That feature is "awesome," according to user Tim Lambrecht, CEO of InCompass IT, an MSP in St Paul, Minn

Anyone heard the word awesome used to describe monitoring tools before? Our customers are passionate about what we do - and so are we!

At the risk of stealing our own thunder, Nimsoft will announce GA of the latest release of NimBUS tomorrow. Branded as the Winter 2007 release (under the covers it is v3.3.5 plus other parts) it contains many exciting features that I'll leave to the press release and web site to describe. It also contains the "agentless" server monitoring solution which will give options to customers that do not want to install any software on the servers being monitored.

Last week was spent on the East Coast, mainly New York and Boston and boy, was it cold! We did numerous analyst and press meetings and I was encouraged to hear a very prominent analyst that I respect immensely tell me that "Nimsoft is THE alternative, and that's a great place to be right now with all the big four struggling with many issues".

Continuing the acquisition theme, HP acquired Bristol Technologies last week (I guess the HP and Mercury response time monitoring solutions were not enough) and of course Symantec announced the acquisition of Altiris. There are many rumors circulating right now about who's next? Some suggest that Symantec may be being looked at by Oracle or HP, but the bottom line is that there are really very few mid size players left standing in this market right now.

All of this creates more opportunity for Nimsoft but we will continue to focus on what we do best....produce a high quality and highly functional product and combine it with unparalleled customer support.

I get to spend some time at home base for the next week or two which is most welcome - too much time in airports and hotels recently.

Finally, we signed our lease on the New York office last week and already have our two first New York based employees. We're looking for more so if anyone knows either sales or systems engineers send them our way.

I read this week that CA has followed HP and BMC in dropping/changing the name of its key Enterprise Management product. Yes, apparently CA has finally decided to rid itself of the Unicenter name. See the blog from Jason Stamper for more details.

Just last month, HP dumped OpenView in favor of HP Software, and a while back BMC dumped Patrol in favor of BMC Performance Manager.

So, in the high stakes world of branding and disassociating your company from the failure of your flagship product, clearly BMC has the first mover advantage, followed by HP, now CA and IBM yet to announce.

I've been so busy these last few weeks. We started the year with our European Sales Training week (we invest in training our reps and our tech team every quarter), then the following week was back to California for US Sales Training, together with the Product Council meeting, the management team meeting, our board meeting (the first one with our new board members) and last but certainly not least, a strategy meeting with one of our largest customers worldwide.

Next week, our top sales and tech folks are off to Cancun for the President's Club trip and then following that I am on a press and analyst tour of the East Coast to launch our exciting new products.

Business continues to be excellent and I am more and more convinced that what we are witnessing (and Nimsoft is leading), is a whole new generation of Enterprise Management solutions which is rendering the traditional products as legacy. I am starting to use the term "Enterprise Management 2.0" internally, because I believe that over the next few years, we will start to see widespread adoption of these types of products that will make the last 15 years seem like a rehearsal.

It's interesting to see an article on BMC Software in Investors Business Daily this week where they state that their distributed systems management revenue has declined from 45% of their business in 2003 to just 30% today. Over the same period their mainframe revenue has gone from 45% to 34%. Amazing! Patrol customers are deserting BMC faster than the mainframe customers - even though spending on distributed systems in the same time frame has exploded and mainframe spending is stagnant. Would you buy Patrol with those numbers?

Oh well...it's not for us to worry about our competitors but instead for us to continue to do what we do and do it better than anyone else. Talking of which, final comment for today.....

A customer called me on Friday and complained about a problem with our support. I thought I'd mention this to show that we're not perfect even though I cannot remember the last time that I got a direct complaint. It turns out that in reality it was a communication issue - the support team had written something into the case that was interpreted differently by the customer than the team had meant. By Friday night our European technical manager had spoken directly to the customer and I received an email back from them saying that all was OK. Just goes to show - no matter how hard you try it's difficult to be perfect. But, when problems creep in, it's how you deal with them that counts.

That's it for now - next blog from either Mexico in 82 degree weather (feels like 88) or Boston in 21 degrees (feels like 12).

We've had a ton of coverage since announcing the VC investment into Nimsoft. Great articles in Network World, SF Biz Times, San Jose Mercury News and others and a nice analyst piece by The 451. We were even referenced by the New York Times web site last week.

We were also in the print edition of the Red Herring this week and I'm going to borrow the last paragraph of the well written article because it sums up my thoughts as follows:

Still, Nimsoft has to hustle in a marketplace dominated by titans like Hewlett-Packard, IBM, CA, and BMC. "As a small company, you can't win against the industry giants unless you outservice them every step of the way," Mr. Read says.

As soon as we have the reprint rights, we'll publish them on to the web site.

We've had many, many customers emailing us yesterday and today after we announced our VC funding, congratulating us on this major step for Nimsoft.

One of my personal favorites...

That's great, Gary. You guys have a very good product and it is getting better all the time with all of the new additions. I don't know what your long term strategy is, but hopefully you won't get bought by a big company that will screw things up!

Onwards and upwards...full speed ahead!

Yesterday, Compuware announced that they would acquire Proxima Technologies for $31m. In case you don't know, Proxima provided a Business Service Management solution that competed with companies such as Managed Objects.

I remember Proxima from many years ago when I was running marketing for Patrol at BMC. Proxima started life providing add-on components to Patrol and grew up into a BSM tool. They have a number of customers, normally very high end, multi-year projects. I believe that they have a very large business with EDS from what I know.

This signals a further reduction in choices for customers, but is also further evidence that the big guys simply lack innovation and have to acquire their way to new product areas. Congratulations to Steve and the Proxima team - let's hope Compuware is a good home for the product and their customers.

Well, even though I'm not back at work this week (the joy of private schools that insist on scheduling the children's holiday different from the public schools), it seems as though 2007 has started in the same manner that 2006 ended.

From a business perspective, things could not have been better in Q4. We had a record quarter by a very large amount, had many new customers come on board, and had two very significant new customer orders that are among the largest in our history and completed a strategic business relationship that I am not allowed to talk about until next week.

Our top few sales reps and technical guys get to go to Cancun at the end of January on the Nimsoft President's Club (the benefit of being a vendor) but the other side of that coin is that we had a few non-performers leave the company at the end of the quarter as well. That's always a tough one, but it comes down to the fact that far too many customers and other employees are dependant on the ongoing success of Nimsoft that we have to make the tough decisions. I always strive for maximum quality and performance in everything that we do, and that means that Nimsoft is not the right place for everyone to work, but sure is great if you are an achiever.

Anyway, as we start 2007 (we have already 6 deals on the board in January), we are looking for new talent across the board. Sales, SEs, marketing, operations and of course developers in Oslo. Recruiting is a major undertaking when you are such a fast growing company and is made much harder by the insistence on keeping the quality high. I'm off to the UK again for next week for sales/se training.

Happy New Year everyone.

Wow!

We have just had a record day in Nimsoft's history, with more new business closing today than any other day. The record day is part of a record month which in turn is part of a record quarter.

Our European operations have been doing fabulously and the US is not far behind. From what I can remember, we have now completed 55 separate transactions in December alone and there is plenty of time left for more.

I would like to congratulate so many new customers of ours who have realized that the traditional large players in this space are rapidly becoming dinosaurs, having to eat others to survive and eventually facing extinction.

One Managed Service Provider in particular, who have a long standing and very positive relationship with IBM, realized that NimBUS was the correct solution for them, despite IBM doing everything they could to win the business.

Tomorrow is the final day before the Christmas holiday. Hopefully we will have most of our business complete so that we can spend next week relaxing somewhat with our families (although I think our CFO wants to finalize the 2007 budgets with me).

Merry Christmas

Came across this list of acquisitions in our space recently that might be of interest:

BMC Software
BGS, Boole and Babbage, Calendra, CoroSoft, DataTools, DGI, Evity, HawkNet, Identify Software, IT Masters, KMXperts, Magic Solutions, Marimba, New Dimension, Open Network, OptiSystems, OTL Software, PATROL, Perform S.A., Remedy, Silvain Faust, Simulus Limited, Viadyne

CA
Adjoin, AI Ware, Apriori, Argis, Cheyene Software, Concord Communications, Control-F1, Cybermation, eSecurity Online, iLumin, InfoSec, Legent, MDY Group, Miramar, Netegrity, Netreon, Niku, Pest Patrol, PHD, Platinum Technology, Qurb, QXCOM,Silent Runner, Sterling Software, Tiny Software, XOsoft, Wily Technology

HP
AppIQ, CodeArts, Consera, ManageX, Novadigm, OuterBay, Peregrine, RLX, SelectAccess, StoraqeApps, Talking Blocks, Trinagy, TruLogica, Trustgenix

IBM
Access/360, Candle, Collation, CIMS Lab, Cyanea, Dascom, DataPower, DBMX, Isogon, Meiosys, Micromuse, ThinkDynamics, Tivoli, TrelliSoft, Unison

Mercury
Allerez, Appilog, BeatBox, Freshwater Software, Kintana, m-Test, Performant, Systinet, Tefensoft

Quest
AfterMail, Aelita, BB4 Technologies, FastLane, Foglight, Imceda, MBR Technologies, MessageWise,
OnWire Technologies, Qmaster, RevealNet, Sitraka, SQL Navigator, TOAD, Vintela, Wingra, Xaffire

Symantec
@stake, 20/20 Software, Axent, Binary Research, BindView, Brightmail, Central Point Software, IMLogic, L-3 Network Security, LIRIC Associates, Mountain Wave, Nexlan, ON Technology, Platform Logic, PowerQuest, QuarterDeck, Recourse Technologies, Relicore, Riptech, SafeWeb, SecurityFocus, Sygate Technologies, TurnTide, URlabs, Veritas, WholeSecurity, XtreamLok

Note: HP's list of acquired companies does not include the announced Mercury acquisition.

And a summary from a well known analyst firm on acquisitions....

Final Thoughts
...quantitatively demonstrate that there is a greater likelihood of failure than success (especially in the early stages of the acquisition) with acquisitions in the IT operations market. Failure in this context means that the expected benefits are not realized by the acquiring firm and that the customers of the acquired technology experience some form of dissatisfaction with support, continued innovation or other areas. We recommend clients examine the track records of past corporate acquisitions to determine whether or not the odds for success will be in their favor....


Interesting quote today in VARBusiness...

"We see acquisitions as a way to bring a quicker pace of innovation to our customers," Al Zollar, general manager of IBM Tivoli Software says.

I had a very successful trip to the UK. Managed to see multiple customers, spend some time with the local sales and technical team and even get to spend some pre-Christmas time with my parents (and of course partake in the occasional beer in the local hostelry).

So far in 6 business days in December, Nimsoft has already completed 11 new customer contracts and that pace will only increase over the next few weeks. It has always amazed me how the speed and volume of orders increases at the "end of quarter" and "end of year" as customers try to negotiate for the best terms and obviously Nimsoft wants to close its fiscal quarters on a strong note.

On Thursday, I went to see three different prospective customers in London (avoiding the tornado that hit London). The diversity of these three companies highlighted to me the broadness of appeal of the NimBUS product. The first was a small, startup WiMAX company that is currently testing its services in a number of businesses around the UK - they are using NimBUS to manage the network and be alerted as potential problems occur. The second was a highly successful Managed Service Provider that is looking for a single Service Level Monitoring product to deploy across its entire customer base. The third was one of the largest banks in the world that has an IT budget of over $1 billion and is looking for a way of measuring the end-user performance of a new application that they are rolling out globally.

From small to very large, from network monitoring to application monitoring to service level monitoring and from WiMAX to MSP to Financial Services.

But, there is a common theme. Customers are looking for solutions that are easy to deploy and use, where they can gain a rapid return on their investment.

It may seem slightly crazy at this point, but I believe that the traditional big four vendors, that provide overly complex, over-engineered, over-priced collections of products will struggle over the next few years without a radical change of strategy. We can already see some of that starting to happen as companies like Nimsoft begin to nibble away at their market.

Back in Bay Area this week and my children's Christmas performance at their school. My son is an elf and my daughter a reindeer - joy.

Four years ago Nimsoft (under the name of Converse Software) commenced business in the US. We started with an office that was no more than 150 square feet and we had initially two people (Paul Rowe and myself) and then added one more (Dan Birck) in this space. Needless to say, we got to know each other very well!

Since then we have moved office twice and today we are proudly in our new 8,000 sq ft home in Redwood Shores. If we walk out of our front door, we pretty much walk into the lobby of Electronic Arts - the largest video game software company in the world. If we look out of the window, we see the headquarters of Oracle. Motivation indeed for us to continue on our growth path.

We have so many good things going on at Nimsoft. Our recent Nfluence User Conferences were extremely well attended and we saw amazing presentations from 5 separate Nimsoft customers. The new product release is going well and we will be announcing some pretty significant corporate updates in the next few weeks.

I'm off the the UK tomorrow to meet more customers, so I'll be able to enjoy our new offices for all of about 10 hours.

And finally, what are my kids getting for Christmas? Remember they already have the iPods.....

Nintendo DS, one black and one white - "I need the one with the double screen dad".

Joy of joys.

Anyone that knows Nimsoft will know that we were founded in Norway and continue to run all of our R&D from Oslo, Norway. However, I have found that many people know very little about Norway and what is stands for as a country.

I have pulled this recent article from the Associated Press which may start to tell you a little more about the Norwegian people and their ethics. Hope this is enjoyable reading.




Norway Oil Fund Mixes Money, Ethics

By DOUG MELLGREN Associated Press Writer
? 2006 The Associated Press

OSLO, Norway ? What do Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Boeing Co., Honeywell International Inc. and Lockheed Martin Corp. share along with being U.S.-based?

They're all corporations that have been put on a blacklist by a Norwegian state investment fund that aims to make the nation's huge oil wealth grow for the benefit of its citizens while making the world a better place.

The $263 billion global fund is under strict government-imposed ethical guidelines to ensure that money doesn't go to companies linked to such things as weapons production, human rights abuses, environmental damage or corruption.

"The main reason is not to contribute to unethical investments so the Norwegian people can sleep better at night," said Gro Nystuen, leader of a national Council of Ethics that oversees the fund's investments in up to 4,000 companies worldwide.

Offshore fields have made NATO-member Norway the world's third largest oil exporter after Saudi Arabia and Russia. As home to the Nobel Peace Prize, it also seeks to be a global do-gooder _ mediating some of the world's worst conflicts and donating more foreign aid per capita than any other nation.

The Nordic nation of 4.6 million people has been plowing its oil windfall into the fund, formally called Norwegian Pension Fund _ Global, which will provide for the retirement of millions of Norwegians once the country's oil resources dry up. There is no set year for when to start using the fund, or the amount to shell out to each retiree _ the economy will decide.

The Central Bank-operated fund is currently worth nearly 2.5 times the entire central government budget for 2007 of this welfare state. The government transferred $34 billion to it in 2005.

The fund was set up by Parliament in 1990, but the first deposits weren't made until 1996. Other countries have ethical guidelines for government funds, but Nystuen said he knew of no other that operated under such strict rules.

The government imposed the guidelines in 2004; since then, 18 companies _ 12 of them U.S.-based _ have been excluded. One of them, oil and gas producer Kerr-McGee Corp., was reinstated this year.

Blacklistings can draw angry responses. After Wal-Mart _ the world's largest retailer _ was barred this year, the U.S. Ambassador to Norway, Benson K. Whitney, denounced the ethics system, calling it unfair, inconsistent and hypocritical.

"Norway found Wal-Mart unethical for allegedly discouraging unions, but the government's Pension Fund stands silent about firms in its portfolio from countries in which no unions, or only state unions, are allowed," he said in a September speech.

"Strangely enough, by this approach, the Pension Fund currently encourages unethical companies and discourages ethical ones."

Despite such criticism, the idea may be spreading.

"A fund _ a major player but I won't say which _ told me they just copied the (Norwegian) rules verbatim," said Knut Kjaer, director of the bank's investment branch. "I have heard a lot of praise for Norway around the world."

The National Council of Ethics periodically reviews investments, then makes recommendations to the Finance Ministry. If it agrees, the ministry orders the bank to sell its stake in the banned company within a few weeks.

The sale is done very secretly, so the company's share price does not collapse.

"When we get the letter, saying they want to exclude a company, we can't go public and say 'Company C will be excluded from the oil fund,'" said Kjaer.

Kjaer said ethics have a price: It costs brokers' fees to sell shares, an order can come when a company's shares are low, and the range of companies to invest in is then reduced. Since the limits are so new, he could not estimate the cost to Norway of ethical investment.

After the shares are sold, Norway announces the ban and its reasons in detail.

"It would probably be fine if we just sold the shares and didn't say anything," she said. "But we are the only ones to not only announce the names of the companies, but also publish the reasons."

Last year, banned companies included Boeing, Honeywell, Northrop Grumman Corp. and United Technologies Corp. for contributing to the production of nuclear weapons; Alliant Techsystems Inc., General Dynamics Corp., L3 Communications Holdings Inc., Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Co. because they contribute to the manufacturing of cluster bombs; and Wal-Mart for alleged human rights and labor abuses.

"I believe that the current ethical investment process is inconsistent with what I have come to know as the fair, just, and transparent values of the Norwegian people," said Whitney, the U.S. ambassador. "The stain of an official accusation of bad ethics harms reputations and can have serious economic implications."

On the other hand, Nystuen said, the fear of just such a Norwegian stain might make some companies "want to tread carefully to avoid bad publicity."

Very busy time for us all at Nimsoft. Last week we ran our NFluence (Nimsoft User Conference) for Scandinavia in Oslo. We had 42 attendees and were treated with some excellent customer presentations. And, in case anyone is wondering, yes it has started snowing in Oslo!

Today we are in San Francisco where the weather is somewhat warmer. We have about 35 people that have attended today's event and have been lucky enough to have presentations by Fusion Storm, Erie Insurance, Alvaka Networks and Novell.

Late tonight, after cocktails, several of us will be on the red-eye to Chicago to prepare for the User Conference there on Thursday. Erie Insurance will again present and also be joined by Berbee. We currently have 50+ registrations for this event.

We also had over 100 customers on a webinar last week to listen to multiple new product announcements from Nimsoft.

Being with so many customers in such a short space of time constantly reminds us of our unwavering commitment to superb customer service.

I'm on vacation next week, I get to take the family to Scottsdale, AZ for Thanksgiving (congrats to Brandon Webb for wining the Cy Young today for the Diamondbacks).

At some point soon, I am going to discuss agents versus agentless monitoring and then also discuss active versus passive response time monitoring. This is not "one size fits all" but hopefully I can make this easier for customers to decide what they need.

Wow!

Sanjay Kumar, the former chief executive of Computer Associates (CA), was sentenced last night to 12 years in jail and ordered to pay a fine of $8 million (?4.2 million), as he became the latest executive to feel the full force of American law.

Another unsolicited customer email that I received today....(which, even after a red-eye to Boston puts a smile on my face).

I wanted to personally thank you for your companies continued support and the new release we have received. The SLA creation time has been cut from hours to minutes and the segmentation by account was a home run.
Your blog is also an excellent example of personalizing a company to its customers and prospects, great idea.

Im going to try to make it to one of the Nimsoft conferences either in Chicago or SF depending on my schedule.

...then it becomes useless.

Pretty obvious stuff huh? Well, it seems not for the largest players in the Enterprise Management space and even for some customers.

Recent Gartner surveys show that the major issues that customers have with products from the "big four" are 1. Cost of ownership and 2. Ease of Use.

So, how does HP respond to this? Of course, by buying Mercury so that they can have even more overlapping products, charge customers even more to get them to work together and further increase complexity.

I recently visited a customer that is evaluating tools in this space. They currently have HP OpenView licensed but are not actively using it because it is "too complex". So, they have decided to re-evaluate other products and have decided to look at Unicenter, Tivoli, BMC, OpenView (!!), Mercury......

In England we will call this "out of the frying pan and into the fire"....see http://www.goenglish.com if it needs explanation.

Customers need to know that there are alternatives to over-engineered solutions from the major vendors that have been created through acquisitions of many different companies. Don't we understand that taking multiple separate software products and trying to "integrate" them into a single solution just doesn't work. I was tasked with this myself at BMC Software where I had the responsibility to take 220 products, from 5 original vendors and make one "solution" that the sales force could sell. Best that can be done is to "paper over the cracks" - but the cracks are still there and customers don't take too long to find them.

Anyhow, to finish with some other recent customers quotes:

"One vendor arrived on site with 7 engineers because each engineer knew one part of the overall product which had been acquired from 7 different companies"

"The engineer doing the demo asked the audience to show him how to use particular pieces of the product because it was so complicated"

And my personal favorite, because it shows that as a company we even do things right when we lose deals, here is an extract from an email I received last week:

"We are currently in the market to purchase another solution as the one we selected has failed to deliver. The purpose of the email is to see if there is any interest on your side to pursue the possibility of bringing Nimbus in house. If not, no hard feelings. If so, we would be glad to work with you to see if the product will meet our needs. We are evaluating several packages currently and would like to add yours to the list. I have regretted not purchasing Nimbus, especially in hind site as it is clearly a great product."

Maybe on this blog next time I'll suggest some meaningful questions that customers should ask their vendor and include in their RFI/RFP questionnaires rather than just listing the 1,000 product features that they need without knowing whether they can actually make use of them or not.

Wow - what a couple of weeks we have had.

Not only did we have the usual end of quarter rush with many customers buying NimBUS for their service level monitoring needs, but we have also hired a new CFO and VP Sales for North America. This is huge for me personally as it will free up some of my time for CEO activities but also maybe I may get some semblance of a personal life back (wishful thinking?)

We are currently in Miami for our worldwide sales/technical meeting. Long days of training for our sales team on the many new/enhanced products that we will be releasing (more later) but also spending time on team building and socializing. These events are so critical for a company that is growing as fast as we are, otherwise we all start to lose track of each other.

Things are moving so well at Nimsoft, and I continue to feel fortunate to be working with such a great team of people and with a company that has such an amazing future.

We just got word from the well respected analyst firm, The 451 Group, that Nimsoft has been selected as one of the dozen finalists for their "start-up innovator" award. This is something that we are very proud of because we know how many start-ups that the 451 talk to each year and we know their analysts have always shown themselves to be extremely intelligent and unbiased (unlike several other analyst firms).

As part of this award, I will be presenting at their Enterprise IT Innovation Summit which we are delighted to do, although I must admit it's a little tough for me personally as it means that I will be away from home and my kids on Halloween (note to event planners...please don't organize summits over important family dates please).

Anyhow, our business is doing great, we are signing up many, many new customers as usual in the last couple of weeks of the quarter including one particular customer/partner that has much broader industry implications (more about this later when I'm allowed to talk about it).

We're off to Miami next week for our quarterly sales training.....

Congratulations to long time Nimsoft customer Berbee on their announcement today that they are being acquired by CDW. This looks to be an exicting time for everyone at Berbee and Nimsoft look forward to continuing to be a part of their continued success. More details can be found on their web site.

Just occassionally (every day?), I am asked whether Nimsoft is going to be acquired. Prospective customers for some reason consider smaller companies a "risk" from acquisition.

I answer this question in the same way every time....

Any company can be acquired and quite honestly, larger companies are more likely to be acquired, and the effects of such an acquisition on the customers to be worse than smaller companies.

On Friday, Embarcadero Technologies announced that they are being acquired by Thoma Cressey Equity Partners.

A few weeks ago, HP announced that they are acquiring Mercury Interactive.....Think of the product overlap in this acquisition? Openview versus Topaz? The monitoring product overlap, the ETE response time overlap, the console overlap, the SLA overlap. I'm sure HP will come out with a product roadmap that says "we'll take the best of breed from both sets of products and merge into a super product". Read my lips - no new taxes.

And of course, Attachmate acquired NetIQ - finally putting them out of their misery.

What's also interesting is that Gartner Group are suggesting that 2 out of the current "big four" will no longer retain that position through the next couple of years. A recent Gartner report stated "Of the Big Four vendors in 2005, only Computer Associates and IBM/Tivoli will be members of the Big Four in 2008 (0.7 probability)." This must be a little worrying for BMC Software or HP customers.

Anyhow, what's the point? The point is that in many ways and somewhat ironically, as a smaller, privately held vendor, customers are actually more secure with our future and our committment to support them than they would be with a mega-vendor. I realize that sounds counter-intuitive but hopefully as the above starts to show, it is fact.

I have spent the last week of my vacation in England and more precisely at my parents home in Upminster. For those that are not aware (most), Upminster is a small, non descript suburb on the East of London and the most famous thing to come from Upminster was the rock singer Ian Dury (remember "Hit me with your Rhythm Stick" - a classic in its day).

Anyhow, on the last day I noticed the headline of the local paper where the article was about a gentleman that actually lived about 400 yards away from my parents. In typical English style, it was sensationalist "85 YEARS IN US JAIL" - I since noticed others "DRAGGED TO THE US IN CHAINS".

On reading the article, I realized that the individual in question was Jeremy Crook, who used to be VP Europe for Peregine Systems. The US government in trying to extradite Jeremy to face allegations of accounting fraud at Peregrine between 1998 and 2001. This is making national news in the UK - see The Daily Telegragh.

Anyhow, I have no idea on his innocence of guilt but it does remind me that part of my duty as CEO of Nimsoft is to ensure that this kind of accounting fraud never happens to our company or investors. We have been and will always be squeaky clean - if we miss our numbers we will own up to it and correct the problems, if we beat our numbers we will celebrate our successes.

PS Did I mention that our CFO is due to start with the company on October 2nd? A huge welcome to Mark who will become a key part of the management team very quickly.

Sitting in Spain having won at golf today blogging from my BlackBerry.

What a saddo I hear you say but I have also responded to numerous customer emails and even used the blackberry to gain web access from my laptop.


Oh well....shot 91 today we play again at 8am tomorrow. More later

Wow - my kids (boy/girl twins) are going to be 6 tomorrow and we're flying to Europe for some much needed vacation. Seems like only yesterday....

The question is "what do you get 6 year old California kids for their birthday?"

Answer: iPods...of course, one blue and one pink. Thanks Steve!

As I pondered how to start this blog, inspiration arrived today in the form of an unsolicited email from a customer. The email (pasted below with names removed), talks about the quality of the product and personnel that Nimsoft provides and thanks us for these efforts.

Nothing, and I mean nothing, is more fulfilling to me personally than to receive this kind of communication. Before I started the company in US several years ago, I had spent many years working for larger, enterprise management software companies where poor customer satisfaction was the norm and shelfware was prevalent. In fact, it is a constant challenge for us to overcome the negative reputation that the "big-four" have created for these types of products.

Because of this, and quite frankly for selfish reasons (happy customers are much more pleasurable to deal with than unhappy ones), we set out to provide customer service that was out of this world. We survey customers every quarter and consistently our customer satisfaction ratings are incredibly high (highest in the business?).

Anyhow, this blog is not intended to be all about Nimsoft and will not be. I am going on vacation this weekend back to Europe (Belgium for golf and then on to Old Blighty to take my 6-year old twins to see their grand-parents).

More soon....email from customer follows - a big THANK YOU to this individual for taking the time to recognize quality.

Gary,

I would like to express my gratitude to Nimsoft for making an excellent product and having exceptional personnel. As a new employee at xxxxx I was assigned a project to evaluate, recommend and implement a proactive monitoring solution to support our mixed environment. The sales staff I dealt with during this process, xxxxx, xxxxx and xxxxx, were outstanding during the initial evaluation and Proof of Concept, all the way through the implementation. These individuals were able to work very closely with the team here at xxxxx to make sure that the NimBUS product fit exactly with what we needed. That additional work lifted NimSoft well above the competition which included NetIQ AppManager, IBM Tivoli and Microsoft MOM. The responsiveness of these individuals has made a lasting impression on the team here. We look forward to a continued relationship.

Kind Regards,

Gary Read is currently CEO of Nimsoft and has been with the company for over four years. He has been working in the world of systems, network and service level management for over 20 years.

Gary is a British citizen and has been living in the San Francisco Bay Area for the last 10 years.