We were talking about how the traditional model in IT operations is that they are always in fire fighting mode. Jump from one fire to the next, trying to douse the flames and prevent the building from burning down.

Boundary is helping to change that way of operating. We are showing our customers the changes in the behavior of their applications so that they can get ahead of problems and prevent them from occurring.

DevOps environments are already operating this way (potential problems are opportunities to improve) but most IT operations teams certainly don’t think this way (problems are inconveniences)

We’ve seen this in some instances with companies trialling Boundary….we show them issues that are forming in their environment but, because those issues have not yet become fires, they are not interested in dealing with them.

We need to move IT ops thinking from fire fighting to fire prevention.

No sales pitch. No marketing stuff. Nothing to listen to. Just lots of interesting people to meet and talk to.

Contact us for venue.

http://www.spire.io/posts/our-architecture.html#comment-517959961

1. We have signed many paying customers. We are well ahead of our plans for customer counts (thank you!) but are always looking to do better.

2. Product quality has been really good. We’ve definitely had some customers find bugs in corner case infrastructure situations and we’ve jumped on those, but for the majority of situations – rock solid.

3. Added to the team. Several new, highly talented engineers have joined in the last month, and we promoted one of our team into the engineering director position (he’s doing great). Happy to report that we’ve had an offer accepted for someone to help build strategic partnerships for us and we are looking at hiring a second sales exec.

4. Lots of customer feedback on the usability and functionality that the solution provides. As a result we will be iterating rapidly to respond to that feedback and take things to the next level.

5. Customer engagement – we are still learning this one. We really want to help our customers get the maximum value from Boundary, but often times customers are so busy that they are hard to get hold of. We have to do better.

6. Pricing – plenty of feedback. No, it’s not yet published on the web site as we are still learning but yes, we will do so.

Next up for Boundary is to deliver the next set of capabilities. After research by the engineering team, we have decided on what those capabilities will be and are busy doing the sprint planning to support them. There are many exciting capabilities planned and I love the way that, now we’ve built this tremendous architecture and foundation, we can iterate quickly.

All in all I’d say we are celebrating our 1 month birthday with a smile on our face but always conscious of continuing to exceed our customer’s very high expectations.

We wouldn’t have it any other way.

It’s easy to forget the amount of years of hard work that are required to get a company to this stage but I can say that if you make it in infrastructure management, then you undoubtedly deserve it. Splunk and the “coming soon” Service-now IPO are showing investors that there is huge value to be had in the overall IT mgmt space.

Infrastructures are fundamentally changing and when fundamental change happens, incumbents get disrupted.

Change is happening in….

1. Infrastructure has moved from static (datacenter) to dynamic (cloud)
2. App stacks are changing from the packaged and commercial BEA, .NET, Oracle etc stacks to the open source Hadoop, NoSQL etc stacks
3. Customers are increasingly accessing business apps via mobile – meaning even a few seconds of downtime or poor performance are cause for concern.

Taken together, these changes mean that incumbent solutions in IT mgmt are simply not equipped to deal with this new world.

Hence Boundary…..more later!

The youngest was so excited when I told her….’Yeah daddy, I’ve never been to Scotland’

Guess what I am doing right now….waiting in a queue for a big corporation to respond….sounds eerily like that voice message you get.

My actual message this morning from AT&T (trying to unlock my iPhone)…..

All representatives are currently assisting other customers. At this time, our average wait is 25 minutes and you are # 128 Thank you for your patience. A representative will be with you shortly.

And then, approx 18 minutes later….

All representatives are currently assisting other customers. At this time, our average wait is 21 minutes and you are # 82 Thank you for your patience. A representative will be with you shortly

Good to see their maths hasn’t improved at all

Nice one and congrats for getting this far to Fred, Rob, Frank and the whole Service-Now team

Just remember….

First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.

Must feel really good to know that you are in the win column.

There were a couple of other minor issues for instance some folks asked us about pricing and, (even though we are waiting a short while before fully publishing pricing on the web site) there was a pricing FAQ page that didn’t quite make it to the final web push (this is also updated now).

But, apart from these minor items the GA launch day was a good one. By the end of the day there were over a 100 more people enjoying Boundary than there were just 24 hours earlier and, we had another company make the commitment to being a paying customer. I’m sure we will make the marketing announcement as soon as we have that company’s permission.

From a product perspective all went really well. The twitter comments which can be easily viewed by searching @boundary were very positive in terms of speed of setup “Took 3 minutes to setup a @boundary meter. 2 minutes and 30 seconds of that was the ec2 instance starting up”, the visibility of the data that Boundary is providing “…I’m watching network traffic in realtime. Ladies and gentlemen, your jetpack”, and the super cool user interface “Goddamn the @boundary UI is cool.”

We received some positive press coverage as well. A selection of the articles:

http://www.talkincloud.com/boundary-launches-saas-based-monitoring-for-big-data-and-cloud-applications/

http://www.enterpriseappstoday.com/data-management/meeting-challenge-of-monitoring-big-data-in-the-cloud.html

http://siliconangle.com/blog/2012/03/27/devops-dossier-boundary/

Our infrastructure and datacenter was great and even though someone at our provider decided to pull a cable on one of our production servers in the middle of the day…..customers didn’t notice a thing. That’s why you write resilient software, because people do dumb things.

Another real positive for me for the day was the level of direct interaction between our engineering team and new customers particularly on the IRC channel (#Boundary on Freenode). Constant discussion all day long with our engineers helping users directly with questions and comments.

So, what now? Well the “spike” that you get from launch interest is very short-lived and real life typically resumes as soon as day 2. Today we’re all business….need to gather the sales and marketing folks together to ensure that we’ve got our plans together for the next few weeks, the engineering team will need to get together this week to start researching and assessing the next waves of capabilities that we’re going to add to the solution, the customer support teams need to be sure that they are following up with all our users and making sure their Boundary experience is an exemplary one and of course….we need to ensure that we take some time to enjoy the achievement so far, of which beer will play a major role.

Thanks to everyone for their support so far – now we’ve got some work to do.

Over the last few months, we have had approx 60 customers beta testing Boundary and much of their feedback has found its way into the GA product or is scheduled for future delivery. Our documentation has been updated, lots of videos have been added, the support forums are up and running, huge amounts of capabilities have been added and the service is also now hosted at one of the largest SAS 70 Type II compliant, Tier III data centers in North America.

So what does it mean for us to be GA? Well the most noticeable difference is that customers can come directly to our web site and get access to a 14 day free trial. There are no sales people to talk to, no webinars to sit through, just give us your details and you’re free to get started. We will be in contact with you during your trial period by whatever means you prefer (chat, phone, email etc) to offer assistance and get your feedback but you should also feel free to reach out to us with comments, questions or suggestions for future capabilities.

At this point, you cannot buy our product via the web and we don’t yet publish our pricing online, but both of these are temporary measures while we get feedback from our initial set of customers. In the future we plan to allow our customers to sign up, browse pricing plans, buy and get support all online.

Today marks a water-shed day for the entire IT monitoring business. We believe that this is the first time that any product has attempted to operate by collecting “all the data all the time” (instead of being restricted by old-fashioned data sampling techniques) and to process that data in real-time to give customers second by second updates. The potential for this architecture and the technology that we have built is enormous; one of our greatest challenges is sure to be deciding which areas of future capability not to build….already we have more ideas that we have time to build them!

So, it remains for me to say a huge thank you to everyone on the Boundary team. Even though I’ve only been a part of this company for a few months, I have been incredibly impressed by our team and how much we can achieve in such a short space of time; I look forward to sharing in the future with you.

And biggest thanks of all of course are reserved for our beta testers and our first set of paying customers. Boundary exists for you and we encourage you to keep giving us feedback, keep telling us your likes and dislikes, keep sharing with us your challenges and of course, how you solve those challenges with Boundary.

I realize that we’re still a small company and many of the incumbents will arrogantly try to dismiss us but we know what the future holds and with your help we will get there.

#monitoringthatdoesnotsuck