Vieo To Get More Channel Friendly

CRN: What have you guys learned about the market and channel in general since you started shipping product?

Fabbio: We've been in the marketplace now with our offering for nearly three full quarters and have learned a lot about what the market wants and what it doesn't want. We've learned how to position and package our offering through the direct channel and the indirect channel. We believe that over the next two quarters we'll have some very good and exciting news about making our products more indirect channel-friendly in addition to adding new partners that will also be taking the product into the marketplace.

CRN: How has the company's go-to-market strategy evolved in that time period?

Fabbio: We had originally focused on the VIEO 1000 being a management appliance. What we've learned is that really it's a management platform. The side effect of that is it also provides a platform that we can now use through various indirect channels, depending on the level of sophistication. We can add more or less capability to the platform depending on what the channel is and who the partners are. We're going to have some announcements in the not-too-distant future about modular packaging that's indirect channel-friendly.

Harriman: We actually foresee a multitiered channel strategy where you can have a fairly straightforward, simple offering for resellers that gives them the ability to deliver more value-added services.

CRN: Does this platform play in the mid-market vs. just the enterprise?

Fabbio: It plays in both markets. We've shifted gears recently. That's why we've been focusing more on the midsize companies of 500 to 2,000 employees. Those organizations have fewer existing standards, less bureaucracy and are more likely to be autonomous and to therefore purchase this offering from a younger company more rapidly.

CRN: So the drive in the midmarket then created the need for a channel?

Fabbio: That's only one of the motivations. We know that in the end we can't put enough feet on the street to drive the business the way we want to.

CRN: How has the company done over the past three quarters?

Fabbio: It's still pretty tough out there economically, but as a company we've been able to enjoy some customer success. Today our pipeline continues to grow. We just announced three new customers.

CRN: What distinguishes the Vieo product in the network management space?

Fabbio: For us, it's about realtime application service-level management. It's really answering the question of, Are application service levels meeting business requirements? It's about controlling service levels in realtime to ensure business needs are satisfied. Any of the tools out there today focused on trying to measure application service levels are all done after the fact and most of them are done with simulated transactions. This is realtime measurement using real live production data.

Harriman: We map resources to the applications that use them and because we baseline the normal operating characteristics of all the software and other resources, when we see something behaving abnormally we immediately correlate that to any service problems. We understand those relationships.

CRN: Beyond realtime support, what differentiates Vieo?

Fabbio: This is a fully integrated offering compared to myriad products that are somehow bolted together. Many rivals try to bolt either the uncommon database or repositories together, and then bolt the interfaces together, and try to bolt the alerts and events together. This is all fully integrated. It has a single database, single interface, single alert, single event, single recommendation, single analytics engine, etc., all in the same offering and it's not for a single platform. It's completely heterogeneous. We support all the popular operating systems, all the popular presentation services, all the popular application services and all the popular database services.

CRN: What's the market opportunity for this category?

Harriman: There's more than $7 billion spent annually on systems management products to do one of three things: expedite problem resolution to minimize business impact; identify threats to service levels to reduce business risk; and automate management tasks to save time and money. Most of the products that are out there today have failed or largely failed at delivering on that promise. We believe that we have an offering today that delivers on all three of those in a centralized, integrated, fully automated solution. We believe the legacy players are struggling and we have an offering that's not only novel but delivers a very quick kind of value in organizations.

CRN: Why are the other guys struggling?

Fabbio: What's happened over time is when the world went from mainframe computing to client/server computing, new management tools emerged. That was the emergence of distributed systems management from Tivoli, CA and all the companies and products. Those products were originally designed for much simpler environments than exist today.Today, we've very rapidly evolved to a much more complex application compute infrastructure and the management vendors haven't kept up. The products haven't been redesigned to take on the complexity of these new environments. What they've forced organizations to do is deploy many, many tools to try to address the management problems that exist today in corporate America. We've had the benefit, as any startup does, to have a clean slate and design this from scratch with a focus on the complex environments that exist today. Forcing people to deploy three to 100 management tools today means a lot of cost, a lot of complexity, a lot of redundancy and it's not needed. You can reduce this down to a single platform that's fully integrated. You have to look at all that in totality and then from that point begin to understand which things have to be optimized, tuned and controlled to ensure delivery of a service level. It's a big optimization equation. And none of the vendors get that yet.

CRN: What's next for Vieo?

Fabbio: We'll focus a great deal of energy going forward on solving specific application service-level problems in the popular packaged apps that are critical to an organization.

Harriman: We now support pretty much all the popular infrastructure components but we'll be adding support for packaged applications. We see that very definitely being a channel play. We will be targeting specific packaged applications in a way integrators can make this as part of their offering. That will reveal itself over the next six months or so. We're in the thick of that now.