BlueStripe Software eases management of virtualization environments

Virtualization offers many advantages including flexibility and cost-savings, but as a second wave of adopters move to virtualized environments, application management can become a problem. A group of four systems management veterans founded BlueStripe Software to address that problem.

Victor Nyman, a founder and COO of BlueStripe, tells TechJournal South that the BlueStripe founders, including Chris Neal, CEO, John Bley, chief architect, and John Whittington, VP of business development, worked together at Java EE Application management company, Wiley Technology, which sold to CA for $390 million.

All of the founders had other substantial experience in the systems management field as well, Nyman, for instance, as chairman and CEO of Relicore Inc., in the ITSM Discovery and Configuration management market. Mr. Nyman led Relicore to a successful merger with Symantec in 2006.

The company operated in stealth mode for more than a year, and Nyman says lots of people tried to find out what the team was up to this time.

Backed by Trinity Ventures

The founders self-funded the launch of BlueStripe about a year and a half ago. The company landed a $5 million A round from Silicon Valley-based Trinity Ventures at the beginning of 2008.

The company’s name and logo represent a blending of their connections to Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, longtime sports rivals. “Two of us went to Duke and two of us to UNC,” explains Nyman.

Before starting BlueStripe, the founders interviewed customers they had served for years, banks, insurance companies and others. “We asked the IT people who owned the online banking applications, ‘what are people screaming about?’ They all said they were having trouble managing their applications on virtualized servers.”

Second wave of adoption needs management tools

Nyman explains that the first wave of adoption virtualized “The low-hanging fruit such as print and file servers.”

Virtualizing applications that tie a Web site to a bank’s back office are not so simple, he says. “It offers a great deal of flexibility, but it separates the application from the server and the management visibility tied to the servers.”

That means, he explains, that the ability to manage and support an application breaks down. “You want the power of virtualization, but not at the cost of management visibility,” says Nyman.

BlueStripe, which introduced its first product, FactFinder, a few weeks ago, is building a management product that goes to the application and does not rely on the server. Management is tied to the application and follows it wherever it goes, so managers can precisely nail down where an application encounters trouble.

FactFinder, the company says, is the industry's only solution enabling enterprises to stage, deploy, and manage business-critical applications in virtual data center environments with the same confidence and control as traditional environments.

Analysts weight in

Numerous industry analysts see this as a necessary next step in the virtualization process. IDC, which estimates that fewer than 10 percent of data centers are currently virtualized, because enterprises have typically only deployed virtualized servers to support non-critical systems.

"The next phase in virtualization adoption will necessitate insight and intelligence at the application level - and even more importantly at the business service level," said John Humphreys, program vice president in IDC's Enterprise Platform Group.

"By connecting the ability to monitor business services to the infrastructure control afforded to customers via virtualization, BlueStripe is closing the feedback loop and enabling customers to actively manage service levels via insight into the applications and control of the virtualized infrastructure."

BlueStripe’s CEO, Chris Neal said in a statement that “Our founding team at BlueStripe played a major role in solving the application management problems brought about by the advent of client/server and Internet-based computing.

"Now, our mission is to improve the way companies manage applications and we're solving the next big problem - application service management across all servers, both physical and virtual."