San Francisco-based IT management startup Boundary has raised $15 million in fresh capital. Scale Venture Partners led the B round and existing investor, Lightspeed Venture Partners, also participated. Boundary’s technology is designed to help companies running cloud applications to deliver “continuous quality of service,” the startup said.
PRESS RELEASE
Boundary has raised $15
million to accelerate its pursuit of revolutionizing IT management.
Scale Venture Partners led the B round and existing investor,
Lightspeed Venture Partners, also participated. The funds will be used
to further scale the business to capitalize on a massive shift
underway in IT environments, which demand a new approach to monitoring
and management. Three months after launching its application
monitoring service, Boundary is tracking 23 billion records per day,
and expects to hit half a trillion by 2013.
“The shift to a cloud-based architecture is unfolding across every
area of IT, and as expected, becoming a huge disruptor for systems
management software,” said Rory O’Driscoll, managing director with
ScaleVP. “Boundary has executed on this huge market opportunity with
precision, getting a superior product to market and establishing
traction with a growing list of tech-savvy customers, including some
of our portfolio companies. I’m excited to be an investor and to work
with Gary, Cliff and the team as they scale up.”
Organizations running their businesses on open source, big data and
cloud environments must rethink IT monitoring to cope with constant
change that has become the norm. This reality has caused rapid growth
in the distributed application performance monitoring and network
management markets. A recent Gartner report stated that more than $18
billion was spent on IT operations management software in 2011, a $1.5
billion increase over spending in 2010. Boundary has distinguished
itself by making monitoring effective, affordable and compatible with
modern IT architectures.
“Consumers expect cloud apps to work well all the time. In this
environment, traditional monitoring systems, with their
sample/test/alert approach, are not good enough,” said Gary Read, CEO
at Boundary. “Boundary is the only vendor whose system was built for
the cloud, monitors performance every second, and delivers actionable
insights to users.”
Many different types and sizes of companies use Boundary, but they all
have one thing in common: they care about providing customers with an
“always-on” experience. Unlike its competitors, Boundary has the
ability to spot the early warning signs of potential system problems,
and resolve them before they impact customers.
Scale Venture Partners has a successful track record of investment.
With $900 million under management, the firm has backed successful
cloud and SaaS startups, including Box, DocuSign, ExactTarget,
FrontBridge Technologies, HubSpot, Omniture, RingCentral, Scale
Computing, uTest and Vitrue. Managing director Rory O’Driscoll, who
has joined the Boundary board, was named to the Forbes Midas List in
2012 and was also named one of the “power players” of venture capital
by AlwaysOn in 2011 and 2012.
“Boundary is bringing the transformative power of Big Data technology
to the IT monitoring market,” said John Vrionis, Managing Director at
Lightspeed Venture Partners and Boundary board member. “We’re proud
to be founding investors in Boundary, and look forward to continuing
to support the company’s world class team in building the leading
next-generation solution.”
“We are excited that Lightspeed has increased its holding in Boundary
and that Rory has joined our board,” said Read. “With support from
great partners like Scale VP and Lightspeed, who understand this huge
opportunity, we will build a company that sets the new standard for
how all organizations measure and monitor IT.”
About Scale Venture Partners
Scale Venture Partners (ScaleVP) invests in high-growth technology
companies with a focus on SaaS, Cloud, Mobile and Internet sectors.
With a proven track record and market-specific expertise, ScaleVP is a
strategic partner in helping entrepreneurs and management teams scale
their business and grow into long-term companies that matter. Founded
in 2000, the firm has $900 million under management and is currently
investing Scale Venture Partners III. Representative investments
include: Box, BrightRoll, DocuSign, Everyday Health, ExactTarget (ET),
HubSpot, NComputing, Omniture, RingCentral and Vitrue.
ScaleVP is located in Foster City, California. For more information,
visit www.scalevp.com or find us on Facebook at
www.facebook.com/scalevp.
About Lightspeed Venture Partners
Lightspeed Venture Partners is a leading global venture capital firm
with over $2 billion of committed capital under management.
Lightspeed’s investment professionals and advisors are located in
Silicon Valley, India, Israel and China with Lightspeed China
Partners. Over the past two decades, the Lightspeed team has backed
more than 200 companies, many of which have become leaders in their
respective markets, including Blue Nile, Brocade, Calista, Ciena,
DoubleClick, eHealth, Fusion-io, Growth Networks, Informatica, Kiva
Software, Kosmix, Link-A-Media, LivingSocial, Lucky Pai, Maker
Communications, Playdom, Pliant, Provigent, Riverbed Technology,
Solazyme, TutorVista, Virsa Systems, Waveset, and XtremIO. For more
information, visit the Lightspeed website: www.lightspeedvp.com.
About Boundary
Boundary enables organizations running cloud applications to deliver
continuous quality of service and enhance their operational agility.
Unlike traditional monitoring solutions, Boundary believes in
collecting all the data by the second, providing critical, real-time
application insights for dynamic infrastructures. Boundary is a
privately-held company based in San Francisco, California with venture
funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Scale Venture Partners.
###
Blog post, Rory O’Driscoll, ScaleVP
Today, we are pleased to announce our Series B investment in Boundary.
Boundary is the application performance monitoring solution designed
for distributed application environments. The team is led by Gary
Read as CEO, and technical founder Cliff Moon.
In every investment we make at ScaleVP, we look for two things, broad
market trends and great execution. Boundary has both.
The Big Trend: Cloud Computing makes existing systems management obsolete
Sometimes we take the whole startup game for granted and we forget how
audacious and crazy it all is. These companies come along, and in a
world that is growing overall at 1.2% this year (go US economy!), they
project five or ten years, of 100% and 200% year-on-year grow rates.
What is more amazing is that some of them pull it off. How do they do
it?
The do it by having a product and a vision that is linked to the wider
trends that are driving change in the overall technology industry.
Companies do not grow from $1 MM to $100 MM on internal effort alone,
no matter how hard the team tries. They grow in part by being
connected to durable long-term trends in the market that provide the
lift that makes all the internal effort worthwhile. For Boundary, it’s
the inexorable shift to cloud computing architecture.
Boundary helps the IT operations managers of these new, cloud based,
distributed networks monitor what is going on in their network. It’s
part of the systems management market – technologies that help IT guys
know if their stuff is working – and it’s been around forever. When IT
was running mainframes, companies like IBM and BMC sold software to
help IT know if the Big Iron was running right. When the architecture
shifted from mainframes to client server, with lots of PC’s and a
smaller number of servers, IBM and BMC were slow to change, and left
the opportunity open for new vendors like Tivoli. Every shift in
computing architecture since, has disrupted the related systems
management market, and created a space for new companies like
Bladelogic, SolarWinds, New Relic and Splunk, four of the most
impressive systems management companies of the past ten years.
The shift to a cloud based architecture is a big trend for IT and a
huge disruptor for systems management software. When your computing is
being done on thousands of virtual machines somewhere in the cloud on
Amazon or Rackspace, then IT operations cannot use any of the existing
technology to monitor what is going on in the network. All the
existing solutions assume hardware level access to the physical
network to enable monitoring and that just isn’t possible in the
cloud. IT doesn’t own the hardware, cannot physically touch it, and
most likely does not even know where it is.
Boundary solves that problem elegantly, by adding a meter/agent to
every server or virtual server that transmits network level
information back to the Boundary website. Customers can go to that
website and see in real time the traffic flows for their system,
regardless of where the servers reside. One of the fun parts of the
due diligence for Boundary has been going on customer visits and
watching the “aha” moment when IT sees, often for the first time,
where their application is running in the network, and where every
packet is coming from and going to. We believe that every IT
professional who is responsible for the performance and security of a
distributed application is going to have to have access to this type
of information over the next five years. That is a lot of IT
professionals. Amazon Web Services is already running 500 million
virtual servers and this number is only going to go up. That is the
long term trend that drives Boundary.
Great Execution: The Boundary Team
A great opportunity is a good start, but it takes great execution to
deliver on it. The Boundary team has done a really nice job of getting
the product to market, and signing early, tech savvy customers like
GitHub. The early customer traction is strong and many of our
portfolio companies have adopted it or are considering it right now.
The team is led by CEO Gary Read who has had prior success in the same
market at Nimsoft and technical founder Cliff Moon who designed and
built the product. What we like most about the team is that they
absolutely understand the mission and what it takes to take it to the
next level. Listening to customers and prospects on what higher level
analysis is needed around a specific application or security threat.
Boundary is turning that feedback into new application packages that
run on top of the core platform and that can be tweaked by IT to
answer whatever is the most pertinent question for IT right now. Stay
tuned for more!
We are delighted to have made this investment and look forward to
working with the Boundary team and Lightspeed Ventures. We think
Boundary is more than ready for Scale.
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