FineGround Launches Optimization Appliance

The device, named FineGround Velocity, is the software company's first foray into the hardware market, and is specifically targeted toward applications such as e-mail, CRM and portals.

According to Jay Mellman, vice president of marketing at the Campbell, Calif.-based firm, optimum application performance is critical as organizations grow and evolve toward increased automation of business processes over LANs and WANs.

"Companies today recognize that poor application performance directly hinders their business," Mellman said. "The first reaction is to increase network capacity, but we provide an approach that tackles performance degradation at the application layer without requiring changes to the infrastructure overall."

As Mellman explained, the new Velocity appliance sits on a corporate network and delivers FineGround's Performance Suite software. This suite comprises a transparent application monitoring system named Appscope, and application optimization software called Condenser, which looks at performance issues and automatically fixes network problems as they arise.

FineGround has been selling the two-headed Performance Suite as software since April 2003. Mellman said the company will charge the same for this software and its new appliance, giving FineGround channel partners the opportunity to the product that best suits customers' needs.

Reaction to the appliance was encouraging among the company's solution providers.

"Some of our clients prefer software, but others prefer an easy to install, preconfigured solution," said Nick Kavadellas, president and CEO of Orasi Software, in Kennesaw, Ga.

"Velocity will give us a turnkey [appliance] that provides our customers [with] an easy solution to optimize application performance. I believe FineGround has hit the bulls-eye."