We decided to rename our cool vendors research this year, since we regularly were featuring technologies which were not related directly to performance demands, but also included general analytics technologies applied to infrastructure and operations professionals needs. In the research for this year we saw a similar split between these technologies.

In the research we profiled several vendors:

Will Cappelli included Metafor Software, who provides ITOA technologies to detect and better understand change and configuration of server environments. The product is available as SaaS or on Premise deployment models.

I included NetMotion Wireless, building some cool technology to better track and manage enterprise wireless quality and delivery of services. The product uses a small agent to measure performance and usage. As wireless connectivity becomes more critical understanding carrier and hardware choices will increase in importance.

Colin Fletcher included Nethink, who builds ITOA technology which rely on end user collected information from desktops to help with problem resolution, configuration issues, and some compliance use cases. Many issues today reside on the end user devices and there are few technology providers who provide the client side visibility needed. (Other popular choices aside from Nexthink include Aternity and LakeSide Software)

Colin Fletcher also included Sumo Logic, a SaaS based offering analyzing machine data (logs) similar to popular tools such as Splunk, but also providing a unique real-time architecture. The product has interesting elements of anomaly detection as well as the ability to coach the system’s auto categorization.

Finally I also included ThousandEyes who’ve taken a commoditized market of synthetic monitoring and made it interesting again by layering on additional data sources about the internet path (BGP). This provides added visibility and information to these synthetic transactions making them much more useful to those running or relying on SaaS (which is pretty much everyone these days).

There is much more detail and analysis in the research, including why they are cool, challenges they face, and who should care about these technologies and technology providers. Clients can access the research at the link below:

Cool Vendors in Application Performance Monitoring and IT Operations Analytics, 2014