Virtual Instruments built upon its significant market momentum generated in 2017 to become a leader in hybrid infrastructure management in 2018. The merged company recorded its best year to date in 2018, with record bookings, nearly a 100 percent growth rate in new customers, over 200% growth in EMEA sales, and 125% growth in channel-initiated business. Significant new versions of its flagship hybrid infrastructure management solutions, VirtualWisdom and WorkloadWisdom, were also introduced. Finally, the company announced several invaluable strategic partnerships and partner programme enhancements that position the Virtual Instruments global ecosystem for mutually beneficial growth in 2019 and beyond.
Today’s enterprises are increasingly embracing a hybrid data centre model in order to meet the widely varied needs of their demanding customers. However, the complexity of today’s highly virtualised, hybrid and multi-cloud environments creates significant management and automation challenges for IT infrastructure and operations teams. A 2018 study conducted by Dimensional Research and sponsored by Virtual Instruments underscored these challenges. The research found that the IT monitoring tools deployed in the vast majority of enterprises don’t provide the required visibility to proactively prevent application slowdowns and outages – and this results in enterprises failing to meet business-critical service level agreements (SLAs). Virtual Instruments’ approach to hybrid infrastructure management eliminates these obstacles by holistically monitoring, analysing and optimising the health, utilisation, capacity and performance of IT infrastructure within the context of the application.
Product Launches
In October 2018, Virtual Instruments launched the next generation of VirtualWisdom, the industry’s most comprehensive hybrid infrastructure management and AIOps platform, to enable application assurance from the data centre to the public cloud. By visualising the infrastructure in the context of the application, VirtualWisdom delivers improved control, greater business agility and reduced infrastructure costs. In addition, the new VirtualWisdom brings an end to the costly, unproductive and antiquated “IT war rooms” typically created to resolve critical application slowdowns and outages.
In June 2018, Virtual Instruments introduced its innovative Cloud Migration Readiness (CMR) service to help enterprises intelligently move to the cloud. The new CMR service provides enterprises with vital insights into the workload behavior of applications targeted for cloud migration. It combines workload analysis and cloud-based simulation with cloud service provider price/performance comparisons. As a result, enterprises can confidently embrace the cloud to advance their digital transformation initiatives.
In February 2018, Virtual Instruments announced WorkloadWisdom, a significantly enhanced and rebranded version of its Load DynamiX Enterprise storage performance validation solution. WorkloadWisdom provides a superior methodology for validating storage performance based on customers’ own production workloads, and is tightly integrated with VirtualWisdom. In December, Virtual Instruments launched the latest version of WorkloadWisdom, which leveraged the company’s partnership with SAN storage emulation systems provider SANBlaze Technology. The new WorkloadWisdom delivers non-volatile memory express (NVMe) workload modelling and testing over Fibre Channel (FC), enabling data-driven analysis of and intelligent workload placement in next-generation flash technologies.
Media recognised Virtual Instruments’ leadership in the hybrid infrastructure management and storage industries in 2018. Storage Magazine named Virtual Instruments “Storage Monitoring & Reporting Vendor of the Year” for the second year in a row in its 2018 Storage Awards, and Bay Area News Group named Virtual Instruments one of its Top Workplaces in 2018 – a recognition based purely on employee feedback.
Customer Relationships
Virtual Instruments drove nearly 100 percent growth in new customers in 2018, with the majority of growth originating from the healthcare and financial services vertical markets. Virtual Instruments’ customer portfolio now includes over 50 of largest US-based healthcare organisations and over 40 of the world’s leading financial institutions. Virtual Instruments experienced significant growth in EMEA sales in 2018 – over 200 percent growth.
Strategic Partnerships
Virtual Instruments significantly strengthened its partner ecosystem and more than doubled its channel-initiated business in 2018. In January, the company announced a major refresh of the Virtual Instruments Partner (VIP) Programme. The enhanced global VIP Programme enables participating partners to benefit from superior profit margins, in addition to rewards based on customer engagement, rather than the traditional and less lucrative model of compliance with training and certification programmes.
In September, Virtual Instruments launched the Virtual Instruments Technology Alliance Program. The new programme extends the company’s collaborative global ecosystem for enterprise-grade hybrid infrastructure management solutions, and ensures the testing and validation of product integrations with Virtual Instruments’ award-winning performance management products.
Virtual Instruments also forged several strategic partnerships with industry leaders in 2018, including SANBlaze Technology, a leading provider of storage solutions for embedded systems; NEXTGEN, an enterprise technology distributor in Australia and New Zealand; and Arrow Electronics, a U.K.-based global technology provider. In April, leading channel publication CRN recognised Virtual Instruments’ partner programmes by awarding the company with a 5-Star rating in CRN’s 2018 Partner Program Guide.
Expanding Executive Team
Virtual Instruments expanded its leadership team in 2018 to support the company’s continued global growth. In February, Peter Dayton joined the executive team as chief financial officer, leading Virtual Instruments’ finance, accounting, legal, IT and manufacturing departments.
“2018 was an incredibly successful year for Virtual Instruments and our rapidly growing global ecosystem of customers and partners,” said Philippe Vincent, CEO of Virtual Instruments. “As the complexity of the modern hybrid data centre continues to increase, our goal is to help enterprises manage that complexity to become more agile and grow their businesses. Through the innovation we’ve injected into our hybrid infrastructure management solutions, along with the invaluable partnerships we’ve established, enterprises can more easily optimise their infrastructure investments and assure application performance and availability requirements.”
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