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eG Innovations moves to the cloud with eG Enterprise-On-Tap offering

May 28, 2011eG Innovations has moved to the cloud with its new eG Enterprise-On-Tap hosted service, which delivers the company's performance management software from a cloud service. While eG Innovations' strength remains its monitoring of virtualized environments at both the desktop and server level, it's starting to look more like a business transaction management vendor. And it's gaining more traction in the market as it closes in on the 300-customer mark.

The 451 take

We expect most IT performance monitoring and management providers to eventually offer a cloud option, and this is eG Innovations' service. Since eG Enterprise-On-Tap uses locally installed lightweight agents, it's more of a hybrid offering, but with a subscription pricing model and no need to install or maintain a central monitoring server. So we think it could be a compelling service for eG Innovations' customers and prospects, especially service providers and enterprises with significant private cloud investments. We've always been impressed with the technology behind this company. Judging from its latest release and improved customer adoption, the marketing side of the house seems to be catching up.

eG Innovations' eG Enterprise-On-Tap is a hosted subscription service for monitoring the performance of applications and business services. eG Enterprise-On-Tap is targeted to enterprises and private cloud providers and can be used to monitor applications running in the public cloud, or in virtualized and physical environments running internally or at a service provider.

Originally available only for Citrix XenDesktop, the hosted service can now monitor everything that the licensed eG Enterprise Suite monitors, including VMware, Microsoft and Citrix server and desktop virtualization environments, IBM AIX LPAR, and Sun Solaris Containers and Logical Domains. Customers have to set up software agents on their servers to be monitored, and then log in to the hosted monitoring console via a Web browser to start accessing performance metrics and reports. Agents communicate with the management console using HTTP/HTTPS.

The service tracks performance through multiple tiers of IT infrastructure, including the server operating systems, virtualization platform, network devices, storage devices, Web front end, database server, profile servers and Active Directory, with a correlation engine for root cause analysis. Other features include automatic baselining of key performance indicators to establish normal performance at various times of the day and track deviations from those norms, tracking and correlation of configuration changes with performance changes, and Web-based historical reporting at the network, application and server layer.

eG Enterprise-on-Tap is available now in the US at $50 per server per month, with a three-month minimum subscription. The service runs on GoGrid's cloud. eG Innovations had a breakout year in 2010, adding 80 new customers, giving it more than 260 altogether in 27 countries and over 1,000 total deployments of its software. The company has 120 employees.

Competition

Unlike many startups, especially in the IT performance management space, eG Innovations is competing for and winning some enterprise deals. So it typically sees the Big Four system management framework vendors – IBM, Hewlett-Packard, BMC Software and CA Technologies – as incumbent players across the board, along with Quest Software. Different competitors challenge in different areas for eG Innovations. For virtual desktop infrastructure, Liquidware Labs and Aternity are the company's main rivals. For virtual server monitoring, it's Veeam Software, Quest's vFoglight and the Big Four. With this latest release, eG Innovations is looking more like a business transaction management provider, with capabilities to measure performance across infrastructure tiers, though it lacks any true deep-dive capabilities. That puts the company more in the league of the likes of OpTier, Correlsense or BlueStripe Software.

As a cloud service, eG Enterprise-on-Tap figures to go up against CA's Nimsoft On Demand (though eG Innovations is targeting larger customers) and possibly New Relic and AppDynamics, though both of those firms offer more deep-dive capabilities at the application server layer. Absolute Performance Inc may be a closer competitor in this area. Another startup, AccelOps, offers a SaaS option.

- Dennis Callaghan

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