News & Events: Recent Media

With release of SI, real-time analysis takes a Netuitive leap

Anayst: Rachel Chalmers
Date: 5 Mar 2009

Event summary

The forthcoming release of Netuitive's flagship product, SI, incorporates the VMware product into the mainline code. Customers can now monitor virtualization and application performance from a single interface.
Netuitive has also added the ability to monitor and analyze clusters as if they were a single entity, while supporting failover and load balancing. The company believes it's the first to offer self-learning analytics on clusters.
Determined to grow in a down market, Netuitive boasts that is has almost 300 customers and that it is finally diversifying outside of the financial vertical. Banks now account for 30% of its accounts, down from 50% in 2007.

The 451 take

We love the overlay model, making as it does the most of customers' legacy investments in monitoring gear while adding sharp mathematics to predict brownouts and blackouts. Virtualization gives analytical overlay firms such as BMC ProactiveNet, Integrien and Netuitive a new system layer to watch over; however, VMware's acquisition of B-hive Networks and the appearance of BlueStripe Software as a pure play should remind them not to get too complacent. What systems administrators and application performance owners want is a single pane of glass that tells them what's happening where and why, and how it can be fixed. With VMware and cluster support now built into the main SI product, Netuitive is approaching that blessed state.

Details

Netuitive's Real-Time Analysis Engine is based on nine patents that flowed from statistics and neural network research at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of South Carolina. Founded in 1997, Netuitive reinvented itself in 2002 to apply its analytics to the performance problems of enterprise applications. Bessemer Venture Partners, Columbia Capital, Flagship Ventures, Noro-Moseley Partners and Thomas Weisel Venture Partners stepped up with $18m in early funding. In 2007, MK Capital and Wasatch Cross Creek Capital contributed to an $8m round, bringing the total funding to $26m. Marquee names among the company's customers include Bank of America, BP plc, Citi, Lloyd's of London, Macy's and Research in Motion.

Netuitive SI first appeared in 2004 and was rebranded by BMC Software and NetIQ as application performance analytics products of their own. By 2006, Netuitive was no longer content with its backseat role in these OEM deals, and started selling SI, Service Analyzer and SI for VMware direct. By Q4 2007, a customer survey found that users of Netuitive SI could pay back their investment within three months by automating about 70% of the routine thresholding, firefighting and troubleshooting chores of the average systems administrator. Server utilization was up 10% for the customer base, but perhaps the most provocative finding was the observation, often repeated, that Netuitive Trusted Alarms, which predict outages or degradations, had worked well enough to prevent such downtime.

Competitive landscape

Netuitive belongs to a group of companies that we identify as providers of analytical overlays, meaning that they harness live datastreams from customers' existing investments in monitoring tools. The vendor, for example, has stable hooks into the BMC, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and NetIQ systems management frameworks. Its peers are BMC's ProactiveNet and the independent Integrien with its Alive! The three companies look at performance data in real time, self-identifying the thresholds within which a healthy system should function. Once these thresholds are set, analytical overlays seek correlations between monitoring inputs that might point to future performance degradations or outages. So powerful is this approach that even IBM has started dabbling in predictive analytics.

With its keen embrace of the VMware layer, Netuitive adds a new set of competitors, those that have evolved purely in the virtual world. On the one hand are edge-performance monitors like Citrix EdgeSight and the independent vmSight. These focus primarily on the problems faced by users of server-hosted desktop virtualization. Closer to the bone for Netuitive are BlueStripe Software, which is a new venture from the founders of Relicore and Wily Technology that promises some early warning of performance bottlenecks; and VMware's own B-hive Networks, which explicitly identifies thresholds and seeks correlation.