Can you tell us a little bit about Akorri and your role?

Akorri develops cross-domain analytical software solutions that optimize performance and utilization in the dynamic data center. Our product BalancePoint virtual infrastructure management software provides automated, infrastructure-wide visibility and analysis to help enterprises fix problems, optimize utilization and improve performance for both virtual and physical servers and storage. IT organizations use BalancePoint to reduce IT infrastructure total cost of ownership and ultimately enable a service oriented infrastructure. As marketing director for Akorri, I handle the product marketing, corporate marketing and channel marketing for the company.

There are a lot of server virtualization management solutions on the market right now. What makes Akorri unique?

The key to BalancePoint’s uniqueness is the analytics. Other server virtualization management tools simply regurgitate VMware vCenter stats and focus on the virtual servers only. BalancePoint takes the whole infrastructure (from app to storage) into account collecting stats from each element and correlating the data into what we call cross-domain analytics such as Infrastructure Response Time and Performance Index that enable IT operations staff to better collaborate, communicate and manage service delivery.

Utilizing these analytics, BalancePoint provides visibility and control over the interrelationships between virtual and physical servers, and storage, enabling IT professionals to quickly solve performance problems, optimize their infrastructure, plan for growth and change, and manage service levels.

Last year VMware purchased B-Hive conductor, released recently under the name VMware vCenter AppSpeed. Does AppSpeed do everything that BalancePoint does? How are the products different?

VMware’s AppSpeed and Akorri’s BalancePoint are actually complementary. AppSpeed is an Applications Performance Management solution monitoring application performance from a network perspective (outside-in servers only). AppSpeed inspects traffic flowing over the vSwitch, discovers and maps the environment, and monitors application performance against SLAs. BalancePoint is an Infrastructure Performance Management solution managing and modeling virtual and physical, server and storage performance and capacity by application (inside-out end-to-end). BalancePoint enables IT operations staff to troubleshoot and optimize performance of the infrastructure, plan server and storage capacity, and manage service levels. So, AppSpeed is upstream from BalancePoint.

There is a lot of talk today about cloud computing. Does BalancePoint help in that area?

Getting to private cloud environments will require customers to first manage their virtual infrastructure so that it is optimized and efficient. This requires infrastructure management capabilities which allow them to baseline their current IT infrastructure in terms of performance requirements, utilization rates and service levels metrics, deliver service levels metrics for each application and business line in their virtual/Cloud environments, and measure their infrastructure utilization levels to assure the most cost effective use of their IT infrastructure. This is what Akorri BalancePoint does today.

Recently Akorri added some new sales management to your executive team – Bill Simpson and Warren Mead – has this resulted in any changes for your customers or resellers?

Yes, Bill and Warren were instrumental in creating Akorri’s new channel partner program, PartnerPoint. The new tiered program offers premier channel members additional marketing and sales support benefits as well as giving all channel partners better online education and certification, additional marketing resources, deal registration and margin protection to support the growth of Akorri’s channel partner business. They started at Akorri this summer and really changed the engine while the plane was in flight. The results so far are increasing revenues by 50 percent last quarter over third quarter 2008 and adding over a dozen new channel partners. Our partners seem to be really pleased with the new program and are demonstrating that by driving Akorri business.

Is Akorri really more expensive than products from vKernel and Vizioncore? How would you compare your pricing model and value proposition compared to them?

Because of its unique ability to monitor and manage storage as well as virtual and physical servers, BalancePoint pricing is based on usable storage capacity per terabyte. The cost is based on the size of the storage environment. vKernel and Vizioncore focus on the virtual servers and don’t provide the deep storage analysis or visibility and control over the virtual and physical environment that BalancePoint provides.

Lisa Crewe is Marketing Director at Akorri. Contact her here.

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Related Links:
View the Akorri BalancePoint Overview, View the Akorri Balancepoint Demonstration, Follow Akorri on Twitter, Akorriblog.com, Akorri.com