SolarWinds Extends Reach into Cloud Applications via Acquisition

Network Evolution Key to Driving Cloud Expansion

Signaling a shift into application performance monitoring (APM) delivered via the cloud, SolarWinds has acquired Pingdom as part of what promises to be a series of moves to expand the company’s product portfolio beyond IT infrastructure running on premise.

With organizations trying to manage more applications than ever, Suaad Sait, executive vice president for products and markets for SolarWinds, says the need for APM tools delivered via the cloud has never been more apparent. The challenge that IT organizations face today, says Sait, is that most of the APM tools they have were never designed to monitor Web application performance at scale.

Sait also notes that the Pingdom tools are a lot simpler to set up than traditional APM tools. In fact, Sait says what distinguishes Pingdom from rival offerings is that it is simple enough for just about anybody inside or out of IT to set up and use. For that reason Pingdom already has 500,000 users of its APM tools, says Sait.

The APM sector has no shortage of competition in or out of the cloud. The company has established a reputation for being willing to provide IT management software at a fraction of the cost of enterprise IT rivals. So it will be interesting to see what pricing strategy SolarWinds creates around an expanding portfolio of management technologies based in the cloud.

In the meantime, with more of the locus for IT management software moving into the cloud, it’s only a matter of time before competition in this space moves from just plain fierce to full-on cutthroat.