This was in Computer Weekly this week in the UK (for the US, Building Society = Savings and Loans)


Case Study: Nottingham Building Society strengthens IT and business links

Author:
Cath Jennings
Posted:
12:15 05 Nov 2008

Nottingham Building Society is in the process of adopting a business-oriented approach to service level management, which will link the performance of IT systems and services directly to business activities.

The decision to move in this direction was taken by IT director Jack Cutts, who was taken on by the firm about two-and-a-half years ago to update its core mortgage systems.

Initial work involved stabilising existing systems before undertaking a complete IT infrastructure refresh, which included introducing systems management products for the first time.

"There was no monitoring in the organisation at all, so the only time we knew there was an issue was when users or customers told us. But we've got finite resources to spend on IT and we wanted to move the balance away from support-and-fix to adding value. So we felt that the more proactive we could be about things, the more effective that shift would be," Cutts says.

As a result the building society, which employs more than 500 staff, rolled out service level management (SLM) applications from Nimsoft and built a graphical dashboard to pictorially represent 12 monitoring areas, one of which included the firms 32 branches.

The next stage in the process, however, will be to introduce business-driven service level agreements (SLAs) based on asking senior business managers 10 key questions about how they wish their IT services to be delivered. Topics will include 'are the right systems available when you need them to be?' and 'are support staff courteous?'.

Cutts explains the rationale, "If I ask the head of marketing, for example, are you happy with your systems being available 99.99 per cent of the time, they'll probably say 'yes'. But if I say 'so it's OK if I take the system down every 13 days for an hour at 12pm?', they're not likely to be so happy."

The problem with SLAs in this context, he says, is that they "sometimes drive the wrong behaviours and if they're too top level, they could be causing customer dissatisfaction." This is not least because "if you ask the business what level of availability they want, they won't necessarily understand the question. So you can pick something that makes you look successful, but that takes away trust".

Moreover, he adds, while "you can create statistics to prove anything, it doesn't mean you're providing a good service or that the customer thinks you're doing a good job". As a result, the questions are intended to act as a discussion point to enable "each department to create their own way of assessing whether we are doing a good job".

"We have numbers around things like availability to help them make the call, but sometimes it's the softer stuff that you don't get to hear about. So if we're getting six out of 10 from one department, we can ask them what their issues are and drive up the SLAs as they become more focused and targeted," Cutts explains.

The openness of the discussion process, he believes, will, in turn, help to create better relationships between the business and IT. "If they're consistently giving you a low mark, they have to justify that, but if they mark us 10 out of 10 each time, they can't really complain. But it's not about a numbers game, it's about making things better," he says.

Cutts warns, however, that it is only possible to adopt such an approach if the IT department is providing a good basic service and has suitable monitoring tools in place. He also believes that the IT team needs to be provided with incentives to carry through on any changes.

"I'm putting SLA performance into my personal objectives and that of my team because if they're not linked in, there's no reason to engage. It shows my real commitment to this approach as I don't feel that you can do this kind of thing half-heartedly," he concludes.

Great blog from one of our customers..

http://www.enkiconsulting.net/blog/the-role-of-remote-monitoring-in-cloud-computing.html

We won an award the other night...Delloite Fastest Growing companies in Silicon Valley - we were 24th.

We also won the San Francisco Business Times award for fastest growing companies in the Bay Area.

Maybe marketing is going to press release these, not sure yet.

Really happy that we've got our new VP Sales on board for the Americas. Dixon joins us from HP Software, where he ended up as part of the acquisition of Mercury. It's the Mercury experience that we really like with Dixon as that was a dynamic, fast moving, rapidly growing company. Our customers can expect to be talking to him very soon - he's a huge customer advocate and loves getting involved.

Ran a $600m sales operation at HP, so hopefully he can scale to our needs for a few years :)

I couldn't be happier with Dixon.

As anyone that knows me knows, I have made some bad hires in the past. All I can tell the folks that work for Nimsoft is that I'm human, I make mistakes, but I recognize them quickly and fix them!

Welcome Dixon....time to make some noise.

Sorry for the delay, but these are finally out today (getting organized after the Goldman investment takes a little time).

Another outstanding set of results, led by very strong managed service provider revenue.

40 brand new logo customers (equaling the record set last quarter), and overall 30% new order growth (we had a very strong comparable in Q3 2007, with 2 of our largest ever contracts closed).

Best of everything though was the subscription revenue, more than doubling year on year. This is the revenue that is primarily driven by MSPs and shows the amazing growth of our MSP business.

We are now up to 720-730 customers worldwide and are looking forward to continuing the momentum.

Sorry for the lack of action on this blog. Been pretty tied up with (a) Deciding on our reaction to the economy (b) Getting through our first board meeting with our new investors (c) Traveling to New Orleans and then Amsterdam for our User Conferences and finally (d) Now I'm back in town, I'm sick!!

Anyhow....let's talk....

Excitement....our new VP Americas starts next week, oh joy of joys. It's a big name individual and another defection from what used to be a great company (Mercury) and is now HP Software. Cannot announce officially of course until next week but we are really excited to have him on board.

Economy....we've decided to watch our costs in some areas. This is not a reflection of actual business which has continued to be very strong (Q3 results announced soon, I promise!) but more a precautionary measure because of everything that all the analysts and experts are telling us. We've actually had a very good start to Q4, and the sales forecasts are really strong but, as I say, we cannot ignore all the advice that's being given that spending will slow, it would be irresponsible of us to do so.

User Conferences...very well attended in both Europe and the US. Had Gartner presenting in the US and Forrester in Europe together with multiple customer presentations. Really interesting to listen to the online brokerage that presented, their business has "gone through the roof" over the last few weeks - they keep hitting new record trading days. It's good to know that someone is doing well out of this mess and not just the bankruptcy lawyers.

Goldman Sachs - yes, we closed the investment at exactly the right time for Nimsoft before the market went completely mad and we are really, really pleased with the value that Goldman are already bringing to the table. This is a significant step for Nimsoft.

Also, a major analyst that uses Nimsoft for all their internal IT monitoring needs emailed me about how unbelievable our support was during a recent major event that they held. This is the best kind of present that I get - unsolicited emails singling out people or just praising the company on what we do for our customers. (I hope they tell their analysts!)

Talking of presents, my kids starting building their Christmas lists this week. Can you believe it...it's October. My son wants an electronic keyboard, Spore, a MacBook, and the iTunes DJ software. My daughter wants a new guitar and TV in her room (preferably a High School Musical one - I went to see HSM3 this week).

Oh well, at least I know that they will change their minds a hundred times between now and Christmas and if they don't, well dad will have to help them change.

Shall we talk about Cloud computing? Because everybody else is. Next time maybe.

Funny that this acquisition has really not garnered much press - bigger things happening in the world maybe.

But, someone asked me my opinion on this as it effects Nimsoft earlier, so I thought I'd share...

By the way, as with everything on this blog, it's just an opinion - so please don't get bent out of shape if I say something you disagree with.

I think that what Managed Objects deliver and what Nimsoft deliver is very different. MO do not do any data collection – they are a presentation layer that sits on top of other monitoring products to bring things into a Business Service perspective. One of the issues with this approach is that it is very expensive (layering more cost on top of existing cost), very “services heavy” - large amounts of services to implement and administer and all the customer transactions are “big deals” - which come under more scrutiny and is more difficult to compete with the large incumbents. E.g. If I already use BMC for monitoring why not add BMC’s BSM solutions rather than going with another vendor? This is I think why Managed Objects has struggled to grow their business.

This is exactly why Nimsoft acquired Indicative. We recognize that customers want to drive budget reductions not budget increases, we recognize that yes, customers want to achieve BSM but they don’t want to spend millions of dollars in software and services to do so. We recognize that the reason that BSM has not gained greater adoption is that it is only the “top few” that can afford it.

Nimsoft’s approach has been to start at the monitoring and data collection layer, making things simple and reducing cost. Then, moving up in to dashboards and Service Level Monitoring and then, with the Indicative acquisition, moving in to BSM. But....when we announce our BSM offering (early 2009), it will be an offering that will dramatically reduce the TCO of BSM solutions – it will be a market changer in much the same way that NimBUS has changed the market for monitoring solutions.

Nothing announced yet....but you heard it here first. Should be announced soon.

One less BSM player....

Let me do the good news first. Our user conference in New Orleans was a great success - we heard from multiple of our customers how they were using the Nimsoft products to achieve value, and many of those customers presented on the big stage - some managed service providers and some end users.

Thanks to all our US (and Japanese) customers that came and supported this event - now on to Amsterdam. (Someone suggested that we should link it to the Renaissance...cool idea.)

Now on to the economy....do we ever learn? Did you see the presentation from Sequoia CEO conference (happy to send you the links if you like). They are very, very concerned and have advised their portfolio companies to conserve cash, cut costs wherever possible.

Nimsoft is very well positioned given the strength of our business combined with the recent investment from Goldman Sachs but we also want to be conservative. We're looking at "slowing down the growth" (we've actually been looking at this for a few months anyhow) and ensuring that we're as efficient as we can be. I got my first email yesterday from someone who's company has not managed to raise new money and are now in trouble...Nimsoft is well positioned to take advantage of these opportunities.

Finally, I saw this opening quote from the Gartner conference in Florida this week...

“A financial era is ending. This age of conspicuous consumption is over, and the age of conspicuous frugality starts now,” said Whit Andrews, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “The world has changed, and your role, as an IT leader must change as well.”

My only question is....where was I during the period of conspicuous consumption?

I thought that ended in 2000 - we have certainly never gone back there!

On a plane to New Orleans tomorrow....

Our name for the user conference this year is the Big Easy. Not very original given the location of New Orleans but we felt it reflected our product and its ease of use pretty well - "finally an alternative to the Big-4 - the Big-Easy" <<
But...here's the thing. The European user conference is in two weeks time and is in Amsterdam. So...what can we call it?

I'm sure there could be some interesting ideas given the location but I'm looking for help. Anyone got any ideas....feel free to add them as comments if you do.

If we get a killer/fun idea I'll personally send someone a bottle of something.

Goldman Sachs Leads $12 Million Investment in Nimsoft

Fastest Growing Systems Management Company Announces Second Round of Funding

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – October 7, 2008 – Nimsoft, the fastest growing systems management company, today announced that the company has completed a funding round of $12 million led by new investor Goldman Sachs with follow on investments from Series A investors JMI Equity and Northzone Ventures. The company will use the funds to continue its growth and help achieve its vision of becoming the world’s leading enterprise systems management software company.

“Nimsoft has an innovative, well-run business model with a strong management team,” said David Campbell, Vice President, Principal Investment Area, Goldman Sachs. “To operate modern data centers, it is critical for IT customers to have robust systems management software that is easy to deploy and maintain to ensure they are providing the right level of service to their businesses. Nimsoft has a proven track record of delivering this functionality to both large and small enterprises and managed service providers (MSPs) around the world. We are pleased to invest in Nimsoft to enable further growth as a leading enterprise systems management provider.”

“Despite the tough economic times, we were overwhelmed with interest from multiple prestigious investors,” said Gary Read, president and CEO of Nimsoft. “An investment from Goldman Sachs is further recognition of the strength of our business model, product performance and future business opportunity. With the global market experience and formidable resources of Goldman Sachs added to the existing knowledge of our initial investors JMI Equity and Northzone Ventures, we are confident we will continue to grow a highly successful business.”

According to Gartner Dataquest, the worldwide revenue for IT operations management software was $12.9 billion in 2007, representing 13.5 percent annual growth.1 Nimsoft extended its position in the Gartner “Magic Quadrant for IT Event Correlation and Analysis, 2007” and has expanded to 700 customers in 30 countries. With revenue growth of 534 percent over the past four years, Nimsoft is the fastest growing systems management company in the world due largely to its easy-to-use performance and availability monitoring software that offers a fast and compelling Return on Investment.

An InformationWeek product review ranked Nimsoft the “Best of the Best” among nine application performance management (APM) solutions. APM is a critical segment of systems management because it monitors the performance of the customer experience – in addition to core IT infrastructure performance. InformationWeek reviewers noted Nimsoft was “a real leader” in service level management for its “flexible and robust SLA reporting engine” and ability to “report SLA performance granularly … which many APM tools are unable to do.”

Lead Goldman Sachs investor David Campbell will join the Nimsoft board of directors and provide strategic counsel for the company’s ongoing development and growth. Peter Arrowsmith of JMI Equity and Torleif Ahlsand of Northzone Ventures will continue to serve on the Nimsoft board of directors.

In a bad economy, what happens to the vendors? Who wins, who loses? Where do customers go for value yet security?

First, let's talk about the big guys? They like to go elephant hunting...they need to win big, big deals because the expectations are so high from their investors. But...the elephants start to disappear in a down economy (it's the big deals that get scrutinized and canceled by the CFO first). So the mega-vendors try to get aggressive on price to compete for smaller budgets but...these vendors have a fundamental problem...their products require tons of services and support, which means no matter how low the software price is, the cost of ownership is still very, very high and cannot be reduced.

Surely then customers go to smaller vendors where they can typically reduce their costs and reduce their budgets? Well yes and no. One of the issues with the small vendors in a down market is that many of them don't survive. They cannot drive the revenue to make them profitable, the investors don't have the appetite to keep adding to their investment and so they end up being sold off cheaply.

So, where does the customer go to (1) Reduce their costs but (2) Keep their risk to a minimum.

The answer is that customers still need to find the smaller vendors to be able to reduce their costs and cut budgets, but they also need to ensure that their vendors are well funded, have good investors for the long term and have good established customer bases and recurring revenue streams from multiple different types of customers.

More tomorrow....

Anyone checked out the MSPmentor list of top 100 MSPs

Guess what? We have signed 2 of the top 10 MSPs on that list as brand new customers in the last few weeks. In both cases we replaced other solutions. More info later as we get permission to reference their names.

Our MSP business is as strong as ever (more so), and, 2 days before the end of the quarter, Nimsoft continues to be incredibly successful. I "think" Friday was our most successful day ever in our history.

The economy sucks but that makes it even more important to gain rapid value from investments.

Oops, our marketing guys are going to hate me again, but we've just won an award for being one of the 50 fastest growing companies in Silicon Valley. We're not sure where we ranked yet, need to attend a dinner to find that out. Then we can issue a press release.

But...can you imagine that....we are in an area dominated by fast growing tech and bio-tech companies and Nimsoft is in the top-50!!!

Huge thank you to our customers, partners and employees for making this happen.

By the way....anyone that reads this....we are hiring and have lots of open positions.

Over the weekend two surprising events happened in sports. The Patriots, the most dominant team in American Football over the last several seasons got thrashed by the worst team. For the Europeans, think about Manchester United getting beaten 5-0 by Leyton Orient.

Also, the highly fancied and stronger European Ryder cup team got well beaten by the Americans.

Interesting watching the post-match interviews....in both cases representatives of the losing teams made the same statement about the victors “they wanted it more, simple as that!”

Lessons for us all.....winning takes many characteristics but most importantly it is about the will and the desire to win. That is why Nimsoft is such a tremendous company and why we beat competitors that, have far greater resources available to them.

The will to win is irresistible – if you have it then you will win.

We LOVE our customers, their success with our product is personal for us, and our customers see, feel and witness that.

Well, Nimsoft was a day late and a dollar short to get included in the announcement from VMWorld today (even we can't be perfect you know).

But, suffice it to say that we will be moving immediately to get our solutions certified as part of the new VMware Ready Program. We've already submitted the forms so we should be able to get this done pretty quickly.

Funny really, we're probably one of the most widely used products for monitoring/mgmt of the VMware environment - just need to be quicker on the mark from a marketing perspective.

Next time...

The following article just appeared in the San Francisco Business Times - it could be a little embarrassing in certain areas but then again, it's not like I'm a politician or something. Have fun...

Friday, September 5, 2008
Gary Read

Co-founder, president and CEO, Nimsoft
San Francisco Business Times


HQ: Redwood City.
2007 revenue: $35 million.
Employees: 165.
Founded: 2002.
Source of startup capital: Personal savings and, in 2007, $10.3 million from JMI Equity and Northzone Ventures.
Background: Born and raised in a suburb of London. Worked a paper route to buy first computer, graduated from high school and started as a programmer for Mastercard. After a series of IT jobs, including stints at Riversoft and BMC, founded Converse Software in 2002, which merged with Nimbus Software in 2004 to form Nimsoft.
Age: 41.
Residence: Los Gatos.
Web site: nimsoft.com.
What it does: IT infrastructure monitoring.
Big picture

Reason for starting business: I’ve always wanted to start my own business.
Biggest plus of ownership: To be able to build something I can be proud of, but also to have control over things.
Biggest drawback: Stress. I take personally the success of the company.
Biggest misconception: Once you’ve got the business to a certain level, people automatically think you suddenly become very wealthy and work less. It’s quite the reverse.
Biggest business strength: We have a hard work ethic.
Biggest business weakness: I really don’t know how to acknowledge my own limitations.
Biggest risk: Buying Indicative Software in April. We’ve never done an acquisition before, and it’s complicated, but it has gone well.
Biggest mistake: I’ve made some pretty big mistakes in people I’ve hired; it sets you back.
Smartest move: Making the decision to merge with Nimbus and the selection of our investors — it’s been tremendous.
Biggest worry: Used to be meeting payroll. Maintaining focus as we get larger is what we’re working on now.
Top source of inspiration: Many things. But I’m a very self-motivated person.
Daily routine

Most challenging task: Keeping everyone on the same page.
Favorite task: Talking to and visiting customers. It’s the best thing.
Least favorite task: Firing people. It’s probably the worst thing.
Biggest frustration: There’s always more that you can do. You can never do everything you want.
Source of support in a business crisis: It can be lonely being CEO, but friends and former colleagues listen and give me advice.
Dreams

Key goal yet to achieve: I’d like Nimsoft to be publicly traded.
First move with capital windfall: I love cars, so I’d probably buy a new Aston Martin.
Five-year plan: To grow dramatically and become the leading company in the industry.
Inducement to sell: I don’t think it’s going to happen anytime soon.
First choice for new career or venture: I have a ton of ideas for new businesses, it’s all about building something.
Personals

Most-admired entrepreneur: (Virgin founder) Richard Branson, of course.
Most interested in meeting: I’m boring, but I’d like to meet Steve Jobs.
Stress reducers: Running, it’s good thinking time.
Favorite pastimes: I have three kids.
Favorite book: Classic English reads like Thomas Harding or Jane Austen.
Favorite films: (Anything with) James Bond.
Favorite restaurant: (Anyplace) with nachos.
Favorite destination: Best city in the world is London, only when the weather is good.
What’s on my iPod: A lot of high-energy dance music, it gets me going.
What I Drive: A 2006 gold Prius.

—Tony C. Yang

Shameless marketing plug....registration for our upcoming user conferences is growing fast.

New Orleans - October 6th to 10th
Amseterdam - October 20th to 24th

Tons of technical training, lots of customer presentations, meet the developers and the people responsible for this amazing product of ours and....get to hear me give the opening address.

Oh well, every silver lining has a cloud :)

Sign up here...

Overall good set of results, growth being powered by Remedy and Bladelogic it seems (36% up on one and 1000%+ up on the other)

But...did you see their Service Assurance results (i.e. performance and availability monitoring)...$20m in license bookings for Q1....DOWN 32% year on year. This compares to Nimsoft that reported an 85% INCREASE in bookings.

Now...if we both continued on that trajectory....let's think...we'd be doing more business than BMC in Service Assurance in....not that long.

Imagine that!

(yeah, I know my logic on projections is a little fuzzy...just a bit of fun)

A little late with this due to my vacation, but big congratulations to all of the folks at our long-time customer Rackspace for their IPO. Nice job guys....!

You'll see the press release later today, but Nimsoft has just been ranked by Inc Magazine as the #1 fastest growing private systems management company. Given that we are faster growing than any of the publicly traded companies, I reckon that makes us the fastest growing systems management company on the planet!

We are also ranked as the 36th fastest growing software company.....can you believe it?

Amazing, amazing stuff.......watch for the press release....

Busy on holiday in the Cotswolds at the moment (probably only English people would know where that is).

Relaxing with the kids

Taking the kids on holiday for 12 days in England. Guess where we're going today?

Man Utd vs Juventus.....taking the kids to the Theater of Dreams for their first taste of English football.

During a recent discussion with a 3rd party, I was asked the question "why don't others have the same success with MSPs?" Then, I was asked the question "If your MSP business is so successful, then why don't you just focus there?"

Interesting questions and I thought worth a quick discussion.

Why are other monitoring companies not successful with MSPs?

We are not claiming that we are the only game in town, but competition with MSPs comes from completely different companies than we compete with for corporate enterprise business. Most of the suppliers in this space are offering low-end solutions, because they are trying to reach the "mass market" of MSPs (estimated at tens of thousands in the US alone).

Nimsoft is several steps above this. Our product is a solution that can start small, but grow to be used in the largest, most complex of environments. In reality, the low end MSP-specific solutions are not competitive with us. For example, just last month, a very large MSP/Outsourcer selected Nimsoft as a replacement for their current monitoring solutions and as the partner of the future. This company has 65,000 devices under management.

So, smaller, ambitious MSPs can get in to Nimsoft easily and grow to become very very large, comfortable in the knowledge that they will never be lacking for scalability or feature set with their customers.

But, why don't the big-4 compete in this space?

They try but, for Nimsoft to do business with MSPs, we changed our pricing completely, we changed our license agreements, we changed the way in which we compensate our sales executives, we changed the manner in which we approach the customer and so on. We changed almost everything from our corporate enterprise business in the way that we do business with an MSP. You have to realize that when we partner with an MSP, we are critical to their business and often times, we are dealing with the President of the company.

The big-4 just don't get it and they are not flexible enough to "partner" rather than "sell".

Why don't we only do MSP business?

Simple, because by having end-user enterprise business from some of the largest organizations in the world, we are assured that our product meets the needs of the most demanding environments. Meetings the most demanding needs of end-users, means that we are well positioned to work with our MSPs on what those needs are, and help them to meet them also and learn from our experiences.

Seems simple? Well it is for us because we've done the work to understand these things.

But, I also understand how difficult this can be for companies that have never done it before or don't have an open mind to new business models.

Gets published this morning.

Highlights are:

86 percent increase in bookings
130 percent increase in recurring revenue
Record number of "new logos" - 41 in the quarter

Some things not in the release are:

Both Indicative and NimBUS revenue ahead of our plan
We made these numbers despite not have a US VP Sales in place (announcement on this soon)
Multiple new contracts with several Fortune 500 companies - including a Fortune 250 insurance company that will now be using Nimsoft as its total enterprise monitoring solution
Released the first integrated piece of Indicative and NimBUS - webinars this week to our customers to show this
Monitoring of VMWare environments is included in almost 90% of all new contracts. Significant order from an investment bank to monitor their VMWare infrastructure

We also hired a country manager for Germany during the quarter, a VP Marketing, VP Strategy and a VP Business Development (not sure we've announced all of these yet).

We continue to perform competitive replacements in many situations with HP probably being top of the list but also NetIQ occurring pretty often. Not too sure, but it feels as though Attachmate have really scaled back the investment in support and development for the NetIQ products.

And finally, we don't win them all. We had a competitive loss at the end of the quarter that hurt. We had won the technical recommendation, had the best overall "value", offered the best support but.....one of our large competitors managed to convince the customer that if they bought multiple products all from them, that the integration would be better.

Funny how some customers still believe that. What we clearly did not do a good job of is letting the customer understand that we must integrate with many other platforms because our business relies on it - therefore our integration capabilities will be better than our competitors.

But...it's true that you cannot win them all and we are very very proud of our competitive win rate which is through the roof.

86 percent growth in bookings in this economy!

Going to Europe today for a little relaxation - it's the Nimsoft President's Club for 2007, so part relaxation and part work.

It's been a very busy few weeks, but feels good to know that we are achieving something special.

Meaning that the end of quarter madness is behind us. The big question now is.....how did we do?

Without giving the game away completely (we have an internal presentation tomorrow and I want the employees to know first).

We did GREAT. Another amazing performance. More brand new customers than ever before. New record revenues in every category. Our MSP business showed tremendous growth plus our end user growth is very strong in both the mid-market and the large enterprise (F500 customers coming on board).

Customer satisfaction continues to be very high; repeat business is at an all time high.

Competitors are being replaced or beaten........this is all based on Nimsoft delivering unparalleled satisfaction and maximum value to our customers.

A huge thank you to all of our employees and customers who are making this into such an incredible success story.

(Oops, looks like I gave the game away).

http://www.itskeptic.org/node/644

The days are long, the nights are short, the adrenalin is flowing, the office is buzzing, my family thinks I'm cranky - it must be end of quarter.

Business is going great, and as usual, many companies leave it until the last days of the quarter to make the commitment.

A quick check in salesforce reveals that there are still 67 transactions that are being forecast in the next 2 days. It's this time of the quarter that I really think about our contracts and finance team - they have to stick around well into the evening just to ensure that all the business is booked, invoices issued and license keys cut - big thank you to them.

Better run, this Macbook air is getting some use!!!

and....it's end of quarter....oh what fun!

Got some great new customers coming on board - another Fortune 500 company just the other day committed to us for monitoring of their entire infrastructure. The VP left me a voicemail after the transaction completed letting me know what a pleasure Nimsoft was to do business with and how they are referring their other vendors to look at us because we are so customer friendly.

Also a State government just placed some substantial business with us. Presented yesterday to one of the hottest companies on the planet - customers love Nimsoft - is there any other company that can provide the scalability and functionality that we provide without the complexity and people costs of the big guys? (that's a rhetorical question because the answer is no).

Not much sleep but fun

....a big Nimsoft MSP partner. Named finalist for the Bay Area Entrepreneur of the Year (think about the competition in the Bay Area and you'll know that is a special achievement).

John Varel, CEO of FusionStorm, Named Finalist for Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year® 2008 Award

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - June 20, 2008) - FusionStorm -- "Making Technology Work" -- an award-winning systems integrator and managed service provider, announced that John Varel, CEO and Founder of FusionStorm, is a finalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2008 Award in Northern California. According to Ernst & Young LLP, the awards program recognizes entrepreneurs who demonstrate extraordinary success in the areas of innovation, financial performance and personal commitment to their businesses and communities. John Varel was selected as a finalist from over 90 nominations by a panel of independent judges. Award winners will be announced at a special gala event on 21st June at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco.

John has had a successful and colorful career as an entrepreneur that has spanned over 30 years. Prior to starting FusionStorm in 1994, he was co-founder of The Concorde Group, one of the largest resellers of Sun Microsystems refurbished hardware. He has also launched many successful syndications, including: Meris Laboratories, the largest physician owned clinical laboratory in the nation, and Zephyr Park, Ltd., one of the earliest wind-parks in Southern California.

OMG - I went to see George Michael last night and managed to beg, steal and borrow my way to front row seats.

Isn't it amazing how, after 26 years of being in this business (and all of his other activities), he hasn't lost a single hair and is still as polished as ever.

However, it did give me some hope when I saw that he had a teleprompter with all the words to his songs.

Overall the concert was amazing. I've never seen so many people (both guys and gals) blowing kisses at the same person.

Anyone considered using a low end product for a large implementation? I had occasion recently with 2 pretty large implementations to discuss this with them. On one of these implementations, they were excited about the lower end product until they realized that there was no distributed architecture. What does that mean? The maximum throughput you can put in to the product is what a single instance can handle - thus having a dramatically negative effect on scalability. If you want more then you put a whole separate instance in place - and they don't talk to each other.

Nimsoft has a highly distributed architecture using a multi-tiered model. Hubs (they don't have to be dedicated machines) can be put anywhere and all connect together. It's firewall friendly (1 port, 1 direction), it's encrypted, and it's guaranteed delivery. We have customers running today on thousands and thousands of devices and we can do much more.

My advice to any buyer is to always test the scalability. I know it's not easy to do in a lab environment, but you need to do it.

When do you most need a monitoring tool? When things are going wrong and events are flooding in.

When are non-scalable monitoring tools most likely to fail? Yep...you got it!

Big kudos and congratulations for our customer Actelion in Switzerland. Their founder Jean-Paul Clozel has just been elected as "World Entrepreneur of the Year".

As they say....success meets success....we are proud to be their vendor partner of choice.

Click Here for the press release

In these days of heightened sensitivity to terrorism, if someone mentions that they've found a bomb at the airport then we automatically think the worst.

But, in London today, they discovered an unexploded World War II bomb near London City Airport (and near the site of the 2012 Olympics), which shut the airport and caused extreme delays (see below for BBC news).

How do I know this....because of course, a Nimsoft employee was on their way to the airport at the time. Fortunately there is more than one airport in London.

For me, red eye to NY tonight, then on to Texas and then on to Norway next week. Can someone buy me a private jet please....one that is as fuel efficient as my Prius!


Airport reopens after WWII bomb

Flights in and out of London City Airport have resumed after the discovery of a World War II bomb nearby halted services.

But passengers have been warned delays will continue into the evening.

The explosive was found in Stratford, east London, in the site for the 2012 London Olympics, on Tuesday afternoon.

On Monday, thousands of Tube commuters were delayed when another World War II bomb was found by Bromley-by-Bow station in east London.

Earlier in the day an enforced air exclusion zone was set up and all flights were cancelled, delayed or diverted.

Passengers are asked to contact their airline for the latest travel information.

since I've added to the blog, but it's not of course. Continue to be really busy and business continues to move along nicely.

I presented at the JMP Securities conference yesterday (leading investment bank) which went very well. I also found out that Nimsoft was named to the JMP Securities "HOT 100" private software companies list.....still trying to get a copy of the report but I'm sure I'll manage to do so.

It was interesting also to me that, of the companies that were presenting over the couple of days of the conference - 8 of them were our customers. This really shows how far we have come - I'm sure a couple of years ago it would have been just 1, or maybe not even that.

NimBUS 3.5 is in general availability and our brand new Service Delivery Portal is in beta. The SDP is getting our customers and prospects very excited - in particular MSPs but also end-users. If you haven't already, then ask us for a demo.

Big issue for me right now is recruitment....where are all the good people? I'm going to list some positions just in case anyone is reading this blog - we pay $1,000 for a referral that leads to a hire - so send to your friends.

VP Sales - Americas
Dir/VP Eastern Region Sales
Multiple Field Sales positions, and inside sales positions both in the US and Europe
MSP specialist Account Manager
SE Director
Sales Operations

I think you get the picture. I'm thinking of hiring an in-house recruiter simply to help us deal with the growth and the constant hiring treadmill.

Big deal...almost as big as Compaq...you've got to hand it to HP, they are aggressively going after acquisitions. I wonder how much this was driven by some of the relationships between the Opsware folks and EDS?

Although, some of my friends over at HP are telling me that their software business is not performing too well.

Not sure this means much for Nimsoft apart from that HP are going to be completely distracted again for the next 2 years.

I'd also wonder what this means to anyone that competes with EDS for outsourcing business....personally I wouldn't want to be investing in systems management software from a direct competitor. Sounds like Nimsoft needs to have a plan to help those companies out?

For those of you that think that being the CEO means that you don't have a boss, you need to think again. I actually have 3 sets of constituents that I "serve".

Those are our customers, our employees and our investors.

We do a great job of keeping our customers happy with the highest satisfaction ratings in the business.
Our investors love us right now (have you seen our results?)
But what about our employees?

I'm pleased to tell everyone that we have just been voted one of the Best Places to Work in the San Francisco Bay Area. We came in #12 in total, across thousands of eligible companies - truly an amazing achievement.

Thanks to everyone that participated in this award, and for all those individuals that are currently working for a competitor of ours....if you're good enough and you're customer focused enough, then we're recruiting.

Just finished up the sales and tech training for the US - great energy and confidence throughout.

We're having a good April so far, quite a few new customers and new contracts.

Integration work has started between pieces of Indicative and NimBUS - we're hoping to get the first pieces into customer hands this quarter - probably looking at GA in July, but it's one of those things that we don't know exactly until we get into the work in depth.

On the road again, visiting with a couple of big customers tomorrow and then back home Los Gatos for Friday night cocktails - can't wait!

In Europe this week for sales and technical training.

It's amazing to feel the energy in the room - the sales team are buzzing - we are beating competitors on a regular basis, they are excited about the Indicative acquisition and ready to take on the world. Stories coming out of some of our competitors is that they are struggling and we're getting many of their sales execs approaching us for positions.

Looks like we will be announcing 69% growth in Q1 2008 versus Q1 2007, and 27 brand new name customers - and that's before adding Indicative.

Tremendous momentum - all built on delivering incredible value to our customers.

We've had tons of press coverage today from the announced merging of Indicative and Nimsoft. All of it positive, everyone loving what we're doing "It's about time someone stood up to the big guys".

One comment that I found particularly amusing was

“Nimsoft’s positioning of itself as a smaller company that can somehow uniquely take on the biggest jobs or the ‘big boys’ in the field; well, it’s amusing, and it’s good to see they have big aspirations,” XXXXX said. “And we do see smaller firms able to displace bigger ones in selected situations. But Nimsoft versus the ‘Big Four’ is, shall we say, quite the stretch.”

Not sure that I need to respond to this apart from to say, just wait and see. I understand your skepticsicm - after all, who wouldn't be? Did anyone believe that Salesforce (David) would disrupt Siebel (Goliath?). Anyhow, we will prove this in the same way that we have always done which is with customer wins.

I am reminded of a quote from Mohandas Gandhi...

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

Has the laughing stopped yet?

Well, the marketing people got me. They said that I wasn't allowed to talk about this until today - this time I had to listen to them.

Anyhow, today, Nimsoft is announcing that it is acquiring Indicative Software of Ft Collins, Colorado.

This will turn out to be an extremely important development in the Performance and Availability Monitoring market. Why is that?

Simply because nobody, and I mean nobody, is mounting a meaningful challenge against the cost and complexity of the large incumbents. Sure...their are plenty of point solutions out there but how many companies can truly say that they address all of the disciplines of performance and availability monitoring, can do so in a heterogenous environment and with the scalability and reliability demanded by some of the largest IT environments in the world as well as being simple enough for small and medium sized environments.

Leading analysts define the disciplines that make up Performance and Availability Monitoring as:

Network Monitoring
Server Monitoring
Database Monitoring
Application Monitoring
End User Response Time Monitoring
Service Level Monitoring
Business Service Management

Nimsoft already covered most of these extremely well, but there are two major areas being added with the Indicative products. First - "passive" end user response time monitoring. Not just the ability to issue synthetic transactions but also the ability to watch the "real" traffic from real users and measure the response time of that. I'll blog another time about when to use passive and when to use active/synthetic - but they are for solving different issues and we will be able to offer both.

The second area is Business Service Management. We decided that the big guys had had this space to themselves for too long and they needed someone to shake it up a little by providing easily implemented and easily managed products with a low cost of ownership. We intend to make Business Service Management "within reach" just as we have done with the other disciplines.

This deal is a huge win for both Nimsoft and Indicative customers. We will continue to support and develop both products and all customers will benefit from our ability to re-use technology from one product in the other (e.g. the Best in Class agent-based data collectors that NimBUS has that we will look to make available to Indicative customers to compliment the existing agent-less capabilities).

Anyhow, today I will be speaking to all our customers and we will be hosting a welcome reception for the former Indicative employees. I am looking forward to both events.

Oh, and before you ask, yes, almost every Indicative employee will be joining Nimsoft. A couple of people won't but pretty much everyone else will.....we are really looking forward to fighting the good fight together.

Remember....some companies promise....we deliver!

I couldn't tell you that we have had yet another amazing quarterly performance. We booked more business today than at any point in our history with many, many deals both with existing customers and new ones.

We did quite a few replacements as well with I believe NetIQ gaining the starring role this quarter as the most replaced product - they are fighting for that crown with HP.

Managed Service business was very strong with multiple new MSPs making commitments to Nimsoft - I don't have the numbers yet but I suspect the MSP business will have grown as a percentage of our overall revenue. We're not seeing any economic weakness yet....

And finally, last but not least, I am so happy because tomorrow we welcome on board our brand new VP Marketing who has joined us from another company in this space (I would say competitor but really we don't compete with them much).

Brian....welcome.....as you know, you're on your own for the first few days as I take a few days rest in Mexico before we continue redefining the Availability and Performance monitoring space with our upcoming announcements on April 8th.

Margarita time?

Yes...it's the last day of the quarter today. We have a lot of business that will happen today - it's great but it's stressful - who ever invented quarterly based reporting?

We are also counting down to our announcement....8 days left.....I hope all the marketing people are ready (I know they are really).

An interesting week last week. BMC putting their hands in their pockets to the tune of $800m to acquire Bladelogic. Kind of a shame really because I thought that Bladelogic were competing very effectively with HP/Opsware and it looked like they could stay independent and grow. One silver lining for me is that I owned stock in Bladelogic so at least that was good.

By the way, I don't consider myself a stock tipping expert at all, but I have done OK by buying stock in systems management companies that I believe are destined to be acquired. The latest one that I *may* buy would be Quest Software.....if their CEO continues with his SEC problems and is forced to leave the company, I would suspect that they would sell the business, much like what happened to Mercury Interactive a while back.

Anyhow, the other item that happened last week was SolarWinds filed to go public. Their business model is just incredible - they spend a really low amount on any R&D activities and sales activities and as such, make a huge profit. Really in the "stack it high and sell it cheap" business - and they do a very good job of executing. Watch for that IPO, it's going to get a very large market value.

1 more week in the quarter and lots more business for us to do. It's that time again....

Wanted to wish anyone that reads this blog and that celebrates Easter, a happy one.

Unfortunately a sad one for myself as I found out that a dear friend of mine that was a truly amazing individual has passed away.

My thoughts are with his family.

Gary

I'm really feeling flattered this last week.

First Joe Panettieri at MSPmentor compliments this blog. Check it out here

Then, it also got picked up by Ryan Shopp at IT Knowledge Exchange here

Kind of amazing because I really have no idea what blogs are meant to be. I've never read a book on it and this blog is purely my thoughts. I talk about Nimsoft because I'm excited about what we are doing and passionate about this space but Joe has it spot on; it's not controlled by marketing (sometimes they get frustrated with me talking about news before they officially release it) or anyone else. Sometimes being the CEO has its benefits.

But, I do notice that pretty much anyone that interviews with us has read the blog. I hope it gives people a good sense for who I am, who Nimsoft is and the culture of the company.

Time to go...

PS I was on a plane yesterday, got the MacBook Air out to do some work, and the lady next to me oohed and ahhed. Turns out that she worked for Apple but had never seen an Air close up. Is this really a laptop that I'm talking about.

We have some huge news cooking. It's news that our employees and customers and partners will love, but unfortunately news that our competitors will hate. But that brings up the question of who are Nimsoft's competitors?

We think of the market as having 4 tiers...

1st - the Big Four (BMC, HP, IBM, CA) - they actually capture about 65% of all the spend in the performance and availability monitoring space. Probably should add Microsoft into this tier - not a very broad soution but they've got the scale. Does size matter?

2nd - The Challengers. Companies that are established and successful - knocking on the door of the big four.

3rd - Point solutions - there are tons of them. Most of them take an open source tool, wrap some code around it and call themselves a software company.

4th - Open source itself - an important part of the market, but not one that we think that large companies will bet their infrastructure on.

So...who do we compete with? Well, in most cases we are competing with the Big Four. Nimsoft is well and truly in the Challenger tier, and probably joined in that tier by companies like NetIQ (Attachmate), Smarts (EMC), Quest but almost nobody else. Most other providers are in the Point solution category and I expect the majority of those companies to fail within the next few years. I recently heard that Groundworks had some pretty major layoffs....true or not?

We're in to our quarter end at the moment, but this year we have Easter to contend with as well. Clearly the Easter Bunny does not have a quarterly quota to meet :)

Yep....NimBUS 3.5 is officially shipping....lots of new stuff in there for customers.

Also....did you see our VIrtualization updates last week? Good press coverage as we extend our market leadership position in the monitoring of VMWare and other virtualized environments.

More new stuff in the queue - we cannot get it out of the door fast enough and....

Major announcements coming in April....very exciting...watch this space..

Yesterday, I flew on the red-eye to the East Coast, got changed in the bathrooms at the airport and then got into a long taxi ride, all to visit with one prospective customer. The customer opened the meeting by asking us "Why have you flown all the way here to see me?"

It was actually the first time I had been asked that question in such a direct manner but to me, the answer was obvious.....because we want to win your business and we are committed to our customers. Doesn't everyone do that? And then it became clear....no, everyone does not do that. No, the CEO of most companies would not do that and no, most companies do not have the commitment to customer success that Nimsoft has.

The rest of the meeting went very well and now we have to prove to this company that we can do what we say we can do. Meanwhile, my journey home was an absolute nightmare travel-wise (oh how I wish for simpler air travel) but I was happy knowing that my time was very well spent.

Yes, I LOVE my Macbook air. First day in the office with it yesterday and plenty of oohs and aahs from everyone that saw it. I have it running VMWare Fusion, with XP, Office and am using the Mac apps simultaneously with the Windows apps - works like a dream and Windows hasn't crashed once (better than running native on the thinkpad so far). Now...if only could get rid of office.......dream........

Anyhow, something is definitely in the air at Nimsoft....unfortunately I cannot reveal details yet but coming soon are a couple of major announcements - probably in the next 6 weeks or so. Our customers will love what we are doing and the industry will take notice. We are gradually, one customer at a time changing this business with happy customers.

By the way, I had a customer email me yesterday saying they were having some problems - the first line of their email was "sorry to bother you with this". Are you kidding me? If any of our customers is not happy with our support, service and product then I want to know about it and we will resolve it immediately. It's not a bother - it's my passion.

Our support director and SE director have already spoken to this customer and, by the time that I go back for an update next week, I expect them to be very satisfied.

People don't believe us.....but we are serious about this stuff.

First...I bought a MacBook Air today (writing this on it). It's cool....I'm a sucker for cool. Loving it so far

Second, very happy to be on the vendor advisory board of the MSPAlliance. We first joined the MSPAlliance when they had about 20 members and we were 2 person company in the US. Now they have over 5,000 members.

But, what I really like about the MSPAlliance is that they are independent.

Has anyone seen the marketing that the other organization...MSPPartners are doing? Well, MSPPartners is owned by Level Platforms, one of the low end vendors in this space. They claim to be independent but meanwhile are owned and operated by a vendor....hmm...questionable?

Nimsoft Revenues Continue Meteoric Rise in Q4 and FY 2007

139 brand new name customers, $29.4m in bookings, 77 percent increase in GAAP revenues and a 131 percent growth in subscription revenue highlight stunning 2007 performance

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – January 23, 2008 – Nimsoft, Inc., the “Big 4” alternative for IT performance and availability monitoring solutions, today announced that the company smashed its business expectations for 2007. Total bookings for the year reached a record $29.4 million and Q4 2007 achieved a new company record at nearly $11 million. Overall, GAAP revenue grew by 77 percent for the year and deferred revenue stood at more than $16 million at the end of 2007. The company added 139 brand new name customers during 2007, bringing the total customer count to 533 in 26 countries. Customers include some of the leading companies in the world, such as Amway Corporation, Barclays Capital, Ladbrokes PLC and T-Systems, together with leading managed service providers, such as CDW Berbee, FusionStorm, Getronics, Novell, Rackspace Managed Hosting and Ramesys, and a large number of medium enterprise organizations such as DeKalb Medical, Foley & Lardner, Liberty Savings Bank and New Enterprise Associates.

Nimsoft President and CEO Gary Read said, “These results clearly demonstrate the amount of pent-up demand in the market for an enterprise management solution that delivers immediate and lasting value. Our customer satisfaction ratings are without parallel, and, every month more and more customers are turning to Nimsoft to replace incumbent and complex products from the large vendors such as BMC Software, CA, HP and IBM. We will continue to deliver solutions that are easy to implement and easy to administer, and yet are sophisticated enough and scalable enough to meet the technical and business requirements of some of the largest companies in the world. Nimsoft is particularly proud of its record of customer satisfaction as evidenced by the maintenance renewal rate of nearly 100 percent and surveys of its entire customer base showing greater than 99 percent of customers are satisfied with the solution and the company.”

Other highlights for the year included:

• Secured $10.3 million in venture capital financing with JMI Equity and NorthzoneVentures; the company’s only round of external investment.
• Recognized by Inc. magazine as one of the Top 50 Fastest Growing Software Companies.
• Ranked by Information Week as excellent for its "performance, scalability, and stellar affordability" as an application performance management solution.
• Won against or replaced "Big 4" monitoring solutions in at least 60 deals in the past 18 months.
• Led the marketplace by delivering next-generation dashboards using Rich Internet Application technology to deliver dynamic, 360-degree views of their entire infrastructure.
• Was one of the first companies to offer comprehensive monitoring and reporting for virtualized infrastructure. Approximately 80 customers are already using Nimsoft to monitor their VMware environment.
• Introduced "No Touch" NimBUS, which delivers on the Nimsoft vision of offering a completely zero administration SLM solution.
• Continuously broadened and enhanced the Nimsoft solution with support for more than 100 different technologies in addition to increasing the product’s scalability.
• Sponsored a Best Practices for Managed Service Providers awards program. Winners were Alvaka Networks, CDW Berbee, Getronics, InCompass IT, SL Powers and Eurodata Systems.
• Nearly 100 Nimsoft customers attended the company’s annual conference held in the United States, making it Nimsoft’s largest and most successful ever.

About Nimsoft
Nimsoft is the premier provider of business-focused IT infrastructure monitoring solutions that customers can easily deploy and use. The company’s monitoring solution, NimBUS, is used by hundreds of companies across diverse industries to manage complex networked systems to meet service level agreement targets. Nimsoft solutions combine performance and availability monitoring, advanced SLM functionality and broad platform coverage for unprecedented ease of implementation, deployment and use.

Symantec have become the latest company to realize that selling monitoring/management solutions can be tough. They have decided to jettison their "Precise" product portfolio into the hands of a Private Equity firm.

I continue to believe that in order to be truly successful in this market, then a company needs unwavering executive commitment and a razor sharp focus. It's true, that if you are large enough vendor then some customers will always purchase your products as part of a strategic relationship, but, if you want to be truly successful, then you've got to keep some focus.

We have multiple companies approaching us at the moment looking to sell themselves. Most of the time their products are great but they have not managed to make the sales model work. We are passionate about our business and the impact that our products have on our customers.


Symantec to Sell Application Performance Management Business to Vector Capital
Thursday January 17, 4:05 pm ET

Vector Capital to Invest Significantly in Customer Support, Technology Development, and Sales and Marketing of APM Solutions

CUPERTINO, CA--(MARKET WIRE)--Jan 17, 2008 -- Symantec Corp. (NasdaqGS:SYMC - News) today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to sell its Application Performance Management (APM) business to Vector Capital, a San Francisco-based private equity firm specializing in spinouts, buyouts and recapitalizations of established technology businesses. Upon closing, the APM business will operate as a new, stand-alone company called Precise Software Solutions Inc. The transaction, which is subject to certain customary conditions, it expected to close by the end of the first calendar quarter of 2008.

Sun acquires MySQL for $1bn
Oracle acquires BEA for $8.5bn

and...the following write up appeared in The451 - an industry analyst (and we haven't even published our results yet!)

Nimsoft keeps momentum going, releases new management portal

Analyst: Dennis Callaghan
Sector: Enterprise Software »»
Date: 15 Jan 2008
Email This Report: to colleagues »» / to yourself »»
451 Report Folder: File report »» View my folder »»

Event summary

Nimsoft continued on its rapid growth trajectory in 2007, adding about 130 net new customers to pass the 500-customer mark. The company was on pace for $23-25m in revenue for the year.
Nimsoft has upgraded its management console, known as the Enterprise Console 2.0, with richer, more interactive dashboards. It built this version entirely in Macromedia Flex, eliminating the need for an ActiveX or Java Runtime.
About 130 of Nimsoft's customers are managed service providers. The company, though still strongest in the midmarket, continues to position itself as a lower-cost service-level monitoring replacement or alternative for large enterprises.
The 451 take

Nimsoft wrote another chapter in its success story in 2007. The company continues to be strong in the midmarket while winning more enterprise deals and reaching still more companies through an expanding MSP channel. Its latest software upgrade is mainly around ease of use and presentation, but does help make Nimsoft's software more credible and attractive for larger enterprises. Nimsoft appears to be holding its own so far as it moves up-market, but we expect it will continue to face more intense and fragmented competition as this segment of its business matures.

Details

Nimsoft enjoyed more growth in 2007 and continues to make waves in the service-level management software space. The company added about 130 new customers last year, pushing it over the 500 mark. It hasn't yet computed final 2007 revenue, but was on pace to land somewhere between $23-25m. That compares to 375 customers and $16m in revenue in 2006, when it added about 120 new customers. About half its customers are in the US, and more than 40 vertical industries are represented in its customer base.

Nimsoft has positioned itself as a lower-cost alternative to the 'Big Four' IT management vendors – IBM, HP, BMC Software and CA Inc – and taken this message to the midmarket. It continues to have success with this approach and now claims about 130 managed service providers as customers. But it has been gradually moving up-market for a while now and claims to have won against or replaced the Big Four on at least 50 deals since the middle of 2006. The company now reports an average deal size (ADS) of about $100,000, about double its ADS of 18 months ago. Its entry price remains around $20,000, however, and it continues to undercut much of its competition on pricing. Nimsoft's latest software upgrade is a new management console, delivered via an online portal built entirely in Macromedia Flex. This results in more interactive, multi-dimensional dashboards that are easier to create.

Competitive landscape

Nimsoft sees the Big Four as its main competition. It does acknowledge hearing more about Indicative Software, a company that is similarly taking on the Big Four in service-level management, but believes it can still beat Indicative on entry pricing. We think Indicative is still generally selling into larger organizations than Nimsoft, but as Nimsoft wins larger deals, the two should see more of each other. Microsoft Operations Manager and Quest Software are competitors to Nimsoft we've cited before.

SLM software vendors like Digital Fuel, Oblicore and Managed Objects may be mindshare competitors to Nimsoft in the initial stages of deals, but none of these companies really has the same positioning or the midmarket presence of Nimsoft, and Nimsoft claims to almost never see them competitively. Likewise, SolarWinds is strong in network performance monitoring, but not really a direct competitor, though SolarWinds has similarly had a lot of success in the MSP channel. Nimsoft defines its niche as more 'IT operations monitoring.' While it does have some transaction monitoring capabilities in its arsenal, it has yet to see any transaction management vendors like OpTier, dynaTrace Software, Correlix and Correlsense on deals. One company that should challenge Nimsoft in the midmarket is Akorri, which offers agentless IT performance monitoring via an appliance.

Did you know that we now have 533 customers in 29 separate countries.

And, we have approximately 60 customers using NimBUS to manage their virtual infrastructures.

And none of those numbers include customers of our managed service provider partners that are using NimBUS which would run into thousands and thousands.

Good stuff.

What an amazing 2007, and an amazing Q4 to finish the year for Nimsoft.

Yet again we had a record breaking quarter with revenue reaching all time highs, the number of new customers also being a record and customer satisfaction remaining unmatched.

For the year 2007, we have firmly established ourselves as the only viable alternative to the big-four....our new bookings have reached the $25m level, our customer base has surpassed 500 and we are regularly replacing so called competitive offerings.

More soon, but just wanted to thank all of our customers, employees and partners for making this a wonderful 2007 for Nimsoft and I am looking forward to an incredible 2008.

Gary

Last week, Gartner published a new Magic Quadrant for the Event Correlation and Analysis market. Some great things to say about Nimsoft, but....because I'm not allowed to quote them I'll have to just tell you my interpretation of what they said until you can get your own full copy of the research.

Nimsoft is a real alternative to the big-4

Nimsoft has shown large increases in number of customers over the last 2 years

Customers say that NimBUS is easy to install/use and has excellent ROI

Nimsoft is an innovator - particularly in the area of managing virtualized environments

I urge you to get a full copy of the research if you are a Gartner subscriber; if not then I believe we are negotiating for reprints.