New Player Hopes to Shake Up Datacenter

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Virtualization, cloud computing, and service oriented architectures (SOA) are all driving change in the vital data center management and business intelligence markets. These products, which connect mission critical systems to each other, are moving to the Web as software sublimates, turning assets that were once physical into services delivered over the Web.

Many of these products are built by young insurgent companies and not by the incumbents (but not all — Cisco’s doing it too).

AccelOps is one such young and upcoming company, founded in 2007 in Santa Clara, California.

Today, AccelOps announced that its datacenter management solution is available as a SaaS offering and as a virtual appliance for customers using VMware.

“The majority of folks we talk to have VMware already,” Scott Gordon, AccelOps vice president of marketing, told InternetNews.com. “Obviously, we’ll look at Citrix and Microsoft immediately down the road.”

Datacenter management is a challenge for any company, much less a startup. “Datacenters deliver critical applications and services to users who are inside or outside the enterprise,” Imin Lee, founder and CEO of AccelOps told InternetNews.com.

“Measuring performance is more important than ever before as IT departments have to meet SLAs, even on their internal cloud,” she added. “Virtualization adds another level of complexity, but we have the visibility managers need to deliver data and avoid resorting to manual measurement.”

The company is also disrupting prices, Gordon said. “The customers we go after are in the mid-tier market. The majority could not fathom spending $250,000 or $100,000 on products from the legacy system vendors.”

The price of AccelOps’ eponymous product, in contrast, starts at $25,000 and rises as customers add capacity, he added.

The product starts by polling the network, building a list of devices using data obtained through SNMP access. SaaS customers download a polling app into their VMware environments, and customers using the virtual appliance already have it when they install AccelOps.

“It knows the standard and backup configurations and it knows what’s running and not running. It captures flow data to measure network resource utilization,” said Gordon. “For hosted customers, the software compresses and then encrypts data before sending it back to the datacenter.”

He added that customers can write additional rules for the product once they get to know it.

Kapow’s latest Web Data Server

While data centers are the foundation of the application stack (define), business intelligence resides at the top. Kapow Technologies, which was founded in 1998, today announced the Kapow Web Data Server 7.0.

The product uses a service-oriented architecture to extract data from enterprise databases and deliver it through the browser to users. By delivering access through the Web, the application sidesteps the politics of data access, according to Ron Yu, Kapow Technologies vice president of marketing. “Political barriers … can be a complete showstopper.
Companies don’t have the energy and resources to fight those battles,” he told InternetNews.com.

“All too often, the application or project just dies on the vine. The line of business manager says it would be great to create new products and services for customers, but IT needs months to design the architecture and specifications.”

Kapow Web Data Server changes this by using the Internet. “There are no published APIs that require coding and development time,” said Yu. “As long as the application or Web site has a browser or HTML interface, customers can access it automatically with our product.”

Although the product is easier to use than traditional business intelligence software, it’s not simple. “In terms of line of business users, a power Excel user can easily learn how to use our product,” said Yu.

Kapow relates a case study concerning a trucking company, J.B. Hunt. Kapow Technologies said that the software delivered automated access to 25 applications, combining data from customers and partners and public Web sites and delivering data to mobile devices.

The results were more trucks running with full loads and the elimination of manual data entry, saving time and money.

The product is available now; pricing was not disclosed.

Article courtesy of InternetNews.com.