Absolute Performance Interview Notes

It has become a fairly regular occurrence that I follow up a feature with the sort of "deleted scenes" blog post detailing some of the discussion from the interview that might not have been fully represented in a feature.

Quite often, an interview will stretch over half an hour, or longer, and almost invariably, interesting things will be discussed that don't fit the final cut of a given story (the actual volume of this material varies from interview to interview, of course, depending on the pace of the conversation and how pointed it is).

Last week I spoke to several executives from Absolute Performance Inc., a developer and provider of performance monitoring technology that might be of interest to a hosting provider either as a tool to be used or as a product to be sold.

According to John Galloway, VP of Sales:

"About half of our business comes through enabling hosting providers, partners who essentially white-label what we do. The other half of our business is actually helping customers directly. So obviously the channel side of the business that we refer to, we're helping those partners. A lot of those are infrastructure-providing hosters. There's a percentage of them who are software providers. So they actually embed some of the things that we do into the software solutions they provide their customers. There are even more classic outsourcers or consultants that we work with to help provide a solution for enterprise also."

He says one of the popular uses of API's monitoring technology is among application providers who want to provide a more intricate means of support.

"The classic example would be a workflow application where the workflow provider has a lot of exposure to tenancy on external applications - for example, if one of the steps is to send an email to somebody. If the email system is down or is having problems or is slow, and the client isn't directly aware of that, suddenly the workflow system is thought to be the bottleneck, and people on the floor aren't able to do their tasks and queues back up and it becomes a problem. Our ability to link or extend outside this workflow process as well as understand what's going on on the gear that's running the application is kind of where the value proposition starts."

Part of the program at API is deploying the infrastructure to support its monitoring solution in a partner's data center (no small investment, at roughly $250,000), which enables that partner to deliver privately branded monitoring services from within its own facility.

Galloway described in some detail the company's relationship with a specific service provider (although he asked that the company not be identified directly; apparently they hadn't discussed the matter of publicizing the relationship.)

"They're using our monitoring platform to better monitor their internal control systems for provisioning and billing, and they're getting ready to roll out a managed exchange solution with a client. So they're going to provide that software as a service, and they're going to use our tools to monitor that. In addition, they're using our capabilities to monitor, at a basic level, all the customers that come into their shop - they have some obligations around network availability and those kinds of things that they do as part of the basic services. Then they're in the process of launching a kind of a scaled down OS monitoring solution as a first up-sell. The second-tier up-sell is around exchange, oracle, apache, IIS, Tomcat,  that kind of standard list of application infrastructure products.

"At the higher level, where the customer actually has a Web site they're running or an ERP application or whatever it happens to be, we would be directly engaged with those clients around managing the database, or monitoring end user experience around the web site.

"So it's everything from helping them make sure their lights are on at the data center to helping clients, almost on a consultative basis, be more effective with the systems they have in their shop."