Thoughts on the VividCortex Acquisition

I visited the Austin office this past week, my last trip to SolarWinds HQ for 2019. It’s always fun to visit Austin and eat my weight in pork products, but this week was better than most. I took part in deep conversations around our recent acquisition of VividCortex. I can’t begin to tell you how excited I am for the opportunity to work with the VividCortex team. Well, maybe I can begin to tell you. Let’s review two data points. In 2013, SolarWinds purchased Confio Software, makers of Ignite (now known as Database Performance Analyzer, or DPA) for $103 million. That’s where my SolarWinds story begins, as I was included with the Confio purchase. I was with Confio since 2010, working as a sales engineer, customer support, product development, and corporate marketing. We made Ignite into a best of breed monitoring solution that’s now the award-winning, on-prem and cloud-hosted DPA loved by thousands of DBAs globally. The SolarWinds investment in DPA has continued, with three major releases in the past 12 months, including the introduction of anomaly detection powered by machine learning, and it was named a 2019 TrustRadius Top Rated product, with 9.1 out of 10 reviewers stating they intended to renew with DPA. The second data point is from last week, when SolarWinds bought VividCortex for $117.5 million. One thing I want to make clear is SolarWinds just doubled down on our investment in database performance monitoring. Anyone suggesting anything otherwise is spreading misinformation. Through all my conversations last week with members of both product teams one theme was clear. We are committed to providing customers with the tools necessary to achieve success in their careers. We want happy customers. We know customer success is our success. Another point that was made clear is the VividCortex product will complement, not replace DPA, expanding our database performance monitoring portfolio in a meaningful way. Sure, there is some overlap with MySQL, as both tools offer support for that platform. But the tools have some key differences in functionality. Currently, VividCortex is a SaaS monitoring solution for popular open-source platforms (PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Amazon Aurora, and Redis). DPA provides both monitoring and query performance insights for broad number of both on-premises and cloud relational database management systems and is not yet available as a SaaS solution. This is why we view VividCortex as a product to enhance what SolarWinds already offers for database performance monitoring. We’re now stronger this week than we were just two weeks ago. And we’re now poised to grow stronger in the coming months. This is an exciting time to be in the database performance monitoring space, with 80% of workloads still Earthed. And with the growth of microservices and performance tuning as part of the development process, database tuning is beginning post-production. If you want to know about our efforts regarding database performance monitoring products, just AMA. I can't wait to get started on helping build next-gen database performance monitoring tools. That’s what VividCortex represents, the future for database performance monitoring, and why this acquisition is so full of goodness. Expect more content in the coming weeks from me regarding our efforts behind the scenes with both VividCortex and DPA.