March 27, 2012

2 Min Read
Boundary Launches SaaS-based Monitoring for Big Data and Cloud Applications

By samdizzy

gary read

Former Nimsoft CEO Gary Read used to focus on mid-market network monitoring. Now, Read is shifting his attention to big data application monitoring. Indeed, Read is now CEO of Boundary, a start-up that develops a SaaS-based monitoring for Big Data and cloud-oriented applications based on Hadoop, Cassandra, Erlang, PHP, Python, Ruby, Riak and CouchDB, among others. Boundary announced general availability of its SaaS service today.

Read is quite familiar with the monitoring market. His previous efforts at Nimsoft involved on-premise and cloud-based monitoring tools for mid-market managed services providers (MSPs). Nimsoft successfully focused on data center monitoring, with a particular emphasis on VBlock and other types of converged infrastructures. But now Read is shifting his attention to to the DevOps market, helping application developers, service providers and corporate customers to monitor their software stacks.

Looking Back and Ahead

Read told Talkin’ Cloud that the Boundary opportunity is quite different from his previous efforts at Nimsoft, which CA Technologies acquired in 2010. Indeed, Nimsoft focused on a large, growing market with lots of entrenched competitors — including big technology companies like BMC, IBM and HP. The Boundary opportunity addresses a much smaller but far faster growing market, with no real entrenched competitors, Read said.

Yes, Boundary can monitor more traditional applications like Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint. But ultimately, Read wants to focus on big data opportunities and the major cloud software development platforms. He mentioned Hadoop and Cassandra several times during our conversation.

According to a prepared statement, Boundary is focusing on four major monitoring opportunities:

  • Data Collection (metrics) – collect all the data all the time instead of sampling;

  • Advanced Analytics – meaningful analytics to help give customers rapid insights into massive amounts of monitoring metrics;

  • Application Centric View – monitor how all of the tiers of the application interact rather than looking at the performance of individual servers, monitor applications built using components and languages such as  Hadoop, Cassandra, Erlang, PHP, Python, Ruby, Riak, CouchDB and others;

  • Real Time – redefining real-time monitoring – see the impact within seconds of the packets flowing as opposed to waiting for several minutes, be able to spot “brown outs” before “black outs” occur.

The big question I asked Read: As more and more service providers potentially plug into Boundary’s SaaS platform, can Boundary truly scale and continue to offer real-time data collection and real-time monitoring. Without revealing Boundary’s secret sauce, Read said that real-time scalability is precisely what makes Boundary unique.

Free Newsletters for the Channel
Register for Your Free Newsletter Now

You May Also Like