http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/835729/000119312512254542/d360749dex1.htm

The question that I have is “where do the traditional Big-4 IT Management vendors go from here?”

In the past, the big vendors have been able to acquire their way out of the “lack of innovation from within” problem. But today, the values of the new wave of companies surely put them out of reach.

Both Splunk and SolarWinds are sitting with market caps above $3bn…..and when Service-Now IPOs later this year it’s going to surpass both of them (my speculation of course).

The issue is that investors have realized that the IT infrastructure is fundamentally changing and with it, the entire discipline of IT Mgmt will change. Products that were designed in pre-Cloud, pre-Big Data, pre-Mobile days simply won’t work for today and tomorrow’s IT infrastructure and applications and the heavy business models of the past are being dismantled.

So investors are looking at companies like Service-Now, Splunk and SolarWinds and seeing the future and are rewarding them as such. Boundary is evidence of a further revolution that is coming.

What to do? Not my place to say but, certainly not the time for the faint of heart. Bold moves needed.

- Our UI team has been busy implementing what seems like a huge amount of enhancements to the UI to enhance customer experience. Impressive.

- I’ve been in numerous customer meetings showing them the power of boundary and getting great feedback

- Also multiple investor meetings this week….we’ll be doing a Series B some time in the not too distant future

- 3 more paying customers signed up, another one verbally committed (waiting for final docs)

- New hire started on Monday, another committed for early June

Off to Carmel Valley for the weekend (waiting until tomorrow morning though to hopefully avoid the traffic)

Busy week next week….

(yes we show you your traffic by country….as well as by network and protocol and…..)

Not every day that a guy gets flowers delivered to the office…..in fact after thinking about it, I believe that this is the first time in my life that someone has sent me flowers.

The question is…what do I do? Ask my colleague to open the card (there is a risk of embarrassment here depending on what and who is on the card) or just hang with it and wait until I’m next in the office.

Well, you open the card of course. I’ve got nothing to hide (at least nothing I can remember).

Anyhow, to the individual that sent these to me….thank you.

For anyone else, if you want to deliver a gift to me (who doesn’t love that?) then Tequila always works Well, and Vodka of course.

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’