VMTurbo – Controlling the realm of application performance

Business View Magazine speaks with the founders of VMTurbo about controlling the realm of application performance.

The word “turbocharged” refers to an engine that is souped up and made greater in power by the spinning of a turbine-driven compressor. Perhaps that is why the founders of VMTurbo – Shmuel Kliger, Yuri Rabover, Yechiam Yemini, Danilo Florissi, and Shai Benjamin – named their software company to reflect the added power of a turbocharged machine. Because, according to Geeta Sachdev, VMTurbo’s Chief Marketing Officer, customers who use VMTurbo’s application performance control platform for cloud and virtual environments can see “anywhere from a 30 to 50 percent capital expenditure and 20 percent operating expense improvement” within a very short period of time. But more importantly, users can see an improvement in application performance by upwards of 40 percent. And that results in a lot turbocharged applications.

Based on real-world implementation of research done by Yemini on Economic Models for Allocating Resources in Computer Systems, the problem that VMTurbo solves is a simple one, but as explained by Sachdev, is complex at scale: “In the modern data center, you have a great deal of infrastructure that allow you to run applications,” she begins. “The applications, the lifeblood of most organizations, are really the signals of demand. So, for example, if your business operates an e-commerce platform, you’ll see peak demand on days like Black Friday or Cyber Monday coming in through application use. It’s crucial to ensure that these applications have enough infrastructure supply, whether its memory, CPU, disk space, or network bandwidth, to be able to respond to this incoming demand.”

Sachdev goes on to explain that over the last two decades, the increased implementation of virtualization introduced complexity with the increase in scale, making it more difficult for companies to manage growing workload demand. “Virtualization allows those servers to handle more capacity by abstracting the functionality within the server. It enables you to be more efficient and to be able to run more workloads on that same capacity. This introduces a great deal of complexity into the environment, however. The challenge now is: if you aren’t able to see the demand coming in, and cannot relate that demand to your existing supply, you will experience performance degradation.

“And so, the premise behind VMTurbo is: how do you keep things in a state of perpetual health? What I mean by that is, if you could match demand to supply, in real time, you’re able to assure application performance. If the demand gets what it needs from a supply perspective, then you’re going to be able to meet your performance goals. But when you’re not able to match that demand to your supply, and you are just guessing at application demand, you’ll have some applications that are starving and some that are overfed. This ultimately leads to slower performance in a business’ most critical applications that cannot afford to be slow. It’s said that ‘slow is the new down.’ If you have an application that’s running slow, you’re going to lose people on your website because they’re not going to wait for your application to run and you’re losing dollars in the meantime.”

She continues: “Businesses want to have highly performing applications. Before VMTurbo, if something wasn’t performing well, the IT administrator would get an alert, decide if it was worth responding to and if so, drill down manually to figure out what to do next. But by the time you have an alert on something that isn’t working, it’s already too late. Either your performance is degraded in the system, or something isn’t working as it should. VMTurbo is an application performance control system; what makes it unique is its ability to match application demand to the infrastructure supply in real time, ensuring application performance. We have a product that can be downloaded in ten minutes, and within 30 minutes you’re getting automatable decisions for things that can, and should, be done to improve performance. It’s a better way to manage a data center because the software is making the decisions. As opposed to humans interpreting data, we’re going to let the software do the work – just like a plane that runs on autopilot.”

Today, VMTurbo has over 1,200 customers across many sectors – service providers, financial services, technology, healthcare, and telecom, among others. “Fortune 500, 1,000, 2,000 companies – these are all prime candidates to use our software,” says Sachdev. “If you think about their data center and their cloud footprint, it is very complicated. They use many different types of technologies, and they don’t really have one control system to tie all those technologies together from an application perspective. So we end up being the control system for these companies, enabling them to run their data centers more efficiently with better performance.”

While VMTurbo helps turbocharge its customers’ bottom lines, the firm’s own growth over the past several years has been equally impressive. Through the third quarter of 2015, the company has experienced 21 consecutive quarters of record revenue growth, drawing funding from several tech-savvy investors, such as ICONIQ Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, Globespan Capital Partners, Highland Capital Partners, and Red Hat, the world’s top open source solution provider.

VMTurbo currently has over 400 employees and a growing global presence. Its corporate headquarters are in Boston, MA; its Canadian headquarters are in Toronto; and its European headquarters are in Reading, UK. It also has offices and engineering centers in Valhalla NY, and Manhattan, NYC.

A key element of VMTurbo’s go-to -market approach is educating potential customers about how they can better run and manage their data centers. “We spend a lot of time listening to our community, and feed that back into our product to ensure our customers not only have a great experience today but are future-proofed against whichever technologies they choose to adopt tomorrow,” Sachdev says. “What’s great about listening is that it tends to become two-way, and the community begins listening to us on where we think the market may be headed. We see this organically in our own Green Circle Community.”

Based on the company’s rapid growth and its development of real-time application performance control as a totally new approach to IT operations management, it’s unlikely that many of the world’s largest enterprises don’t already know who VMTurbo is. And if they don’t – they probably soon will.

AT A GLANCE

WHO: VMTurbo
WHAT: Maker of an Application Performance Control System for cloud & virtual environments
WHERE: Headquarters in Boston, Massachusetts
WEBSITE: www.vmturbo.com

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