Can you briefly tell us a little bit yourself about how Correlsense got started?

I founded Correlsense along with Lanir Shacham, who is now the Correlsense CTO. We first started working together by offering services to solve IT performance problems. Often, we were called in when organizations were in panic mode, having already assembled a war room of network and database experts, systems administrators, developers and architects. Through our time spent dissecting complex IT problems, we quickly realized that the data did not exist to be able to identify the source of problems. A lot of the data was taken from random sampling, but nothing was available that gave us an end-to-end look at each transaction as it made its way through the data center. More importantly, there was no way to correlate data into meaningful context. We moved from analyzing problems to figuring out how to collect 100 percent of the data in real time, tying it back to what was occurring during the transaction process, and then analyzing the results. This process of discovery took three years and ultimately resulted in founding Correlsense and our flagship software product, SharePath.

Where did the company get its name?

Correlsense is all about transactions. We track and detect transaction paths in physical and virtual environments and correlate the data to isolate performance bottlenecks and to ensure IT reliability.

What about your experience and history before Correlsense?

Before founding Correlsense, I founded Internative Solutions, a provider of knowledge management solutions designed to support contact centers through multiple contact channels. Lanir and I met while studying at the Israel Defense Force’s Mamram computing center.

Why does Business Transaction Management (BTM) matter?

The common denominator among all IT systems is transactions — an end-to-end account of what happens when the user of an online service or application clicks “send” and receives a response.  With this granular information, enterprises can ensure IT reliability by using this data to optimize the end-user experience, minimize the risks associated with new service roll-outs, issue chargebacks for IT resources consumed, and improve the capacity planning process.

To monitor the end-user experience, Correlsense offers a subset of SharePath free for one year at www.real-user-monitoring.com. This is an enterprise-class offering that tracks every individual user interaction. Users of the tool can see the response times and service levels with online systems to better understand the quality of the online experience they are providing.

How is your company or technology positioned relative to the competition?

Other solutions conduct random sampling and monitor each hop in a transaction path separately. While this was not a significant disadvantage in the past when application architectures were simple, today’s architectures are much more complex and dynamic, causing the path of transactions to execute across 20 to 30 different components with hundreds of invocations. This makes performance management nearly impossible due to the lack of business context through all services, as well as the lack of visibility into how transactions execute throughout the infrastructure. We take a different approach. Our data collectors are installed in every application logical node. The metrics the collectors take are sent to the backend servers, which then stitch together the entire transaction path, providing significantly more reliable results in less time.

What market segments are you targeting?

Correlsense targets the financial services/banking, insurance, online retail and telecommunications markets.

What channels are being used to sell your SharePath software?

Correlsense sells directly to enterprise IT organizations, as well as through regional channel partners worldwide.

For the technologist who is reading this, who appreciated “the deep dive”, what is it that you can tell us that he/she would really appreciate about your product?

We’re seeing what’s driving complexity is not only the fact that the infrastructure is changing and applications seem more complex, but also these frequent change cycles are driving a lot of complexity into production environments. Much of what people deal with performance-wise relates to other things that were not done upstream. When we’re implementing change, such as rolling out a new service, we need to try to do other activities upstream around tuning, planning and understanding the impact of change so that we can roll that back as a continuous chain of improvement. The kind of data that Correlsense captures means IT organizations can get a better understanding of their test and production environments in order to truly leverage agile development.

So where does Correlsense go from here?

The data we collect has more uses than fine-tuning application performance. Recently, we’ve begun to analyze how to use the data to examine, for example, the impact of new service roll-outs or to accurately rate and charge business units for the amount of IT resources they consume. To that end, we are developing an IT reliability ecosystem which brings together specialists in the areas of chargebacks, application optimization, capacity planning, security and more. We’re doing all the legwork of finding knowledgeable partners so our customers have access to experts that can help add value with the information they already have, moving IT from a cost center to a profit center.

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Related Links: www.correlsense.com, Try our software at www.real-user-monitoring.com

Oren Elias is CEO of CorrelSense. Contact him at Oren.elias@correlsense.com