Press Release

Monitis, the leading provider of 100% Cloud-based application performance, server and network monitoring solutions, today announced that it has been invited to participate in The 451 Group’s 2009 Innovators’ Showcase at its Fourth Annual Client Conference on November 3-4 at Boston’s Marriott Longwharf Hotel. In addition to announcing its new vision and roadmap at the conference, Monitis plans a series of major new network and cloud monitoring announcements during the week that will continue to cement its lead over conventional, software-based monitoring technologies.

San Jose, CA October 28, 2009 – Monitis, the leading provider of 100% Cloud-based application and IT infrastructure monitoring solutions, is one of only 6 companies selected by The 451 Group, a respected technology industry analyst firm, to present its vision: “Monitoring in the Cloud: Monitor Anything from Anywhere”, to more than 300 top executives from leading US enterprises.

The 451 Group, with its focus on analyzing the business of enterprise IT innovation, covers hundreds of stealth and early-stage companies. The 451 Group’s Innovators’ Showcase, a regular part of the company’s Client Conference since the inception of the event in 2006, showcases some of the best and brightest of these young companies.

Participants, who are nominated by 451 Group analysts, present their business plans and demos of their technologies to The 451 Group Client Conference attendees, who include venture capitalists, investment bankers, enterprise IT end users, software and hardware vendors and system integrators. Attendees are given 451 Group scrip to “invest” in the Innovators Showcase companies. The company that receives the most scrip is honored at the end of the conference.

“The cloud is the next frontier of IT operations management,” said Dennis Callaghan, enterprise software analyst at The 451 Group. “With its ability to do performance monitoring, testing and configuration management in the Cloud, and of workloads running in the Cloud, at an affordable price, we believe Monitis is a company to watch in the nascent Cloud management space.”

In addition to announcing its new vision and roadmap at the conference, Monitis plans a series of major new announcements during the week that will continue to cement its lead over conventional, software-based monitoring technologies.

According to Hovhannes Avoyan, Monitis’ Founder and CEO “Our success to-date comes from the insight that launched the company in the first place. Back then, when a few of us experienced just too many late nights stuck in the office due to inefficient monitoring and management tools, we began to look around and see that many of our counterparts were exasperated by the same issues. The Cloud was offering a better way, and we jumped at the chance to change the game.”

One of Monitis’ early customers, Schoolwires will also be joining Monitis during its presentation to discuss the impact Monitis’ Cloud-based solutions has had on his business. Schoolwires has been using Monitis’ all-in-one suite of monitoring tools for more than 2 years. “Utilizing the Cloud, has led to major advances at Schoolwires!” stated Rick Stivers, Director of Network & IT Services at Schoolwires, Inc. “We’ve been able to gain efficiencies, while reducing costs and the net result is an increase in SLA. Monitis is a critical tool we utilize to quickly respond to downtime for the 1,200 plus web sites we manage.”

What:    The 451 Group’s Fourth Annual Client Conference Innovators’ Showcase
When:    Nov 3-4, 2009
Where:    Boston’s Marriott Longwharf Hotel

For more information on The 451 Group’s 4th Annual Client Event, please visit: Innovators Showcase Webpage.

About Monitis All-in-One Monitoring Platform
Monitis is a 100% Cloud-based, complete, and flexible IT monitoring solution which consolidates back-end, application, and cloud monitoring in an all-in-one, central monitoring service. The platform is easily customizable and may be used for managing all kinds of IT assets such as websites, servers, routers, switches, VoIP devices, DNS, databases, processes and any other IP devices. Monitis provides users with a comprehensive view of their system’s health and performance.

About Monitis
Monitis believes that the Cloud is the biggest thing to happen in IT management since IT management. Having seen this vision early, Monitis is now the global leader in developing this market. It is the first affordable network and systems monitoring solution based 100% in the Cloud. More than 50,000 customers from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies to government agencies and educational institutions have chosen Monitis to reduce system downtime, improve the productivity of their IT staff, and reduce operational expenditures.

Monitis was founded in 2005 by a team of seasoned entrepreneurs and fed-up and worn-out developers who were tired of complaining about the limits of software-based tools, while inspired by the promise of the Cloud. Headquartered in San Jose, CA, Monitis is lead by a team of IT professionals with deep experience running enterprise-grade IT businesses, as well as starting and selling several IT start-ups. Using a global workforce, particularly its R&D team based in Yerevan, Armenia, Monitis is poised to move from strength to strength. At present, it has a loyal and enthusiastic user community of 50,000, and an average month-on-month revenue growth of over 10%.

About The 451 Group
The 451 Group is an independent technology-industry analyst company focused on the business of enterprise IT innovation. The company’s analysts provide critical and timely insight into the market and competitive dynamics of innovation in emerging technology segments. Clients of the company – at vendor, investor, service-provider and end-user organizations – rely on The 451 Group’s insight to support both strategic and tactical decision-making for competitive advantage.

The 451 Group also operates Tier1 Research – an independent division of The 451 Group – which analyzes the financial and industry implications of developments impacting public and private companies within the hosting, communications and Internet infrastructure sectors. The 451 Group is headquartered in New York, with offices in key locations, including San Francisco, Washington, D.C., London and Boston.

About Schoolwires, Inc.
Schoolwires Inc. is headquartered in Pennsylvania, USA.

Schoolwires provides strategic online communication, community-management and productivity solutions to the K-12 education market. The company’s core product is SchoolwiresCentricityTM, which brings together robust and flexible website management, community management and web 2.0/social network capabilities in a single, user-centric solution. Schoolwires also delivers SchoolwiresSynergyTM, a digital file sharing solution, Schoolwires AssistTM, a service request solution, and SchoolwiresShare(TM), an exclusive online client community and support center.

Schoolwires is recognized in the Inc. 500 List as one of the fastest growing private companies in the nation. The company’s on-demand solutions are deployed at nearly 4,000 schools serving an estimated four million students, parents, teachers and administrators throughout North America.

Contact:
Monitis Inc.
Sales & Marketing Department
info@monitis.com
http://www.monitis.com
US & Canada Toll Free: +1-800-657-7949
UK + International: +44-845-527-3346
France + International: +33-48-607-9035
2880 Zanker Road Suite 203
San Jose, CA-95134
USA

More news from Gartner’s technology conference in Orlando. Seems that amid the recent downturn in tech spending, firms still invested in cloud computing and virtualization. And they spent in order to save money.

According to Gartner, revenue from cloud services is due to exceed $56 billion this year, up from 21% in 2008. Compare that to a more than 5% decline for the entire IT industry. The cloud market is expected to reach $150.1 billion by 2013.

Aside from helping firms save money, cloud computing allows companies to grow without spending more on capital, and that’s an attractive proposition in this economy, too.

Meanwhile, the virtualization market is only in the beginning stages of growth. About 16% of the data runs through virtualized machines, stimulating multiple servers and making them more efficient. Last year, there were 5.8 million virtualized servers; Gartner predicts that number to rise ten-fold by 2012.

At the conference, a Gartner analyst said that cost-savings from VMs were less important than the agility of a virtual server, pointing out that virtualization provides a path to using more cloud services.

Gartner predicts that both technologies will remain attractive, as companies look to expand once the economy turns around. Nevertheless, others noted the skittishness among companies to put their sensitive data on the web.

I found it interesting reading, too, about how all kinds of IT companies are providing services to businesses using the cloud. And they’re doing an important work. For one, take firms that monitor cloud-based servers and apps.

How does one say “cloud computing” in French? If you’re not French and you don’t already know the answer, it’s “informatique en nuage,” literally: computing in the cloud.

I am not French, but how do I know this? I came across a story in the Wall Street Journal, on Oct. 14^th, which highlighted the difficulty that France’s guardian’s of the French language, a group of professors, linguists, scientists and others are having coming to, well, terms, with new Anglicized phrases – often spawned by Internet development, for example, the World Wide Web (in French: “toile d-araignée mondiale.”

Apparently, the proposed term, “information en nuage,” was too vague for the group and they turned it down. Other proposals: Capacité Informatique en Ligne (which means online computing). Shortened, it’s CIEL, which means “sky” in French.

One member of the oversight group even wanted to stick his head in the sand and not invent a French term at all. “I think we can survive without the term “cloud computing,” the WSJ quoted him as saying.

Ah well, at least everybody’s speaking about the cloud – even if they can’t come up with a name for it.

At this posting, the term “cloud computing” is still awaiting translation in French.

When I go to visit a prospective client, I’m often asked to explain why it’s better to have an integrated web server monitoring service to oversee that company’s websites and other public services externally, as well as its networks and server resources internally? Why a single solution rather than two specialized end-user performance and server utilization monitors? Wouldn’t multiple solutions be better apt to handle the many problems that arise?

Well, for one, your IT department will have a much simpler job. A single solution will literally alter the way that IT operates.

Let’s look at it this way. When you’re driving your car to a new destination, you’re typically required to watch a number of things in order to drive safely – for example, the dashboard to check on speed and remaining fuel plus a map to make sure you don’t’ get lost. In fact, to coordinate it all, you have to pull over every so often to check the map, ask for directions if needed, get gas and make sure your car’s running properly.

But if you have technology like a GPS navigator – you get a single solution that handles multiple tasks: a map that knows your speed and current location, and it eliminates the need for you to stop to coordinate multiple tasks. You always know where you are and, by setting your destination, you’re sure about the route you’re taking and how long it will take you to get there.

Think of it this way, too. A GPS allows you to save time and have more fun and less stress on the road. When you are late, you can focus on driving, but if you’ve got more than enough time, you can find points of interest along the way, without having to worry about getting lost.

So, why not consider a single product for monitoring IT networks, one that combines the understanding of delivered service levels provided by external monitoring systems with the knowledge of resource use you get from internal server and network monitoring. You’d wind up with the detailed picture, combined with an accurate assessment of the end-user experience.

Choosing the right, single solution, you can track:

• The uptime and speed of websites from the end-user point of view
• The performance and load of servers, including those that are virtualized or housed on the cloud
• The uptime and functionality of applications such as email, VoIP, databases, business applications, processes, transactions
• The availability of networks, including switches, routers, VPN, firewall, DNS, VoIP

A single website, network and server monitoring service can handle a multitude of tasks efficiently – leaving IT managers to better focus on more pressing issues.

We at Monitis have another new product to talk about that will make it easier for companies to compute on the cloud.

In August we launched Monitis S3 Monitoring, based on Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) monitoring technology. This new ability lets customers independently monitor their S3 usage and storage. And it notifies them when they reach prescribed thresholds.

With Monitis S3 Monitoring, we’re providing customers with greater access and control over the cloud infrastructure.

This all is based on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) approach, and is the latest product line-up in Monitis’s user-friendly, cost-effective systems (Monitis already provides EC2 monitoring). This gives Monitis the ability to show the users graphical displays illustrating the number of objects in each virtual folder or bucket, their total size, and the number of virtual folders, among other things. Users can set notification rules for each metric that we monitor. If you’re a customer, you can choose to be notified by Twitter, instant messaging, SMS, and/or email when any threshold is reached.

“On-demand cloud computing is at high-demand now, and the need for cloud monitoring is urgent,” said Hovhannes Avoyan, CEO of Monitis. “Our mission is to meet this need, and we provide tools that are fast, easy and affordable.”

Users who sign up for Monitis, receive access to Monitis Cloud, which is a web-centric on-demand software that does not require any downloads. This is a service beneficial to IT managers, as well as businesses ranging from small to enterprise-level.

A Little about S3

The S3 is an online storage service offered by Amazon’s Web Services division. Amazon S3 uses a simple web interface to provide unlimited data storage.

S3 was the first web service Amazon offered to the public, first in the U.S. in 2006 and then in Europe in 2007. There are an estimated 52 billion objects stored on Amazon S3 as of March 2009. S3 also includes image and web hosting and a back-up for its storage.

Read more about the new Monitis Cloud Monitoring Service!

Only a day after it launched its own e-mail cloud on October 5th, IBM announced a private data storage cloud. It’s called the Smart Business Storage Cloud, and with it, IBM will release an Information Archive. This is the latest cloud news to come from IBM, which seems eager to get into this space.

But this isn’t the only cloud product that will come down the pike from IBM. The company is promising a business-grade public storage cloud with flexible consumption models, complete with a self-service user interface. (Look over your shoulder Amazon S3; competition is heating up!)

IBM says its new product is a “true scale-out clustered model not offered by its competition,” according to a recent story on the company’s cloud<%2

Today, more companies than ever are offering complex business services over the Internet via cloud computing. For business-critical applications, every minute of downtime means lost sales, customers and opportunities. It is a challenge to keep websites up and running round the clock.

Web monitoring services can help businesses make sure that their sites are functioning. Yet, simply checking if a website is working and online doesn’t mean that users are having a satisfactory experience. It’s like driving a 20-year old car. Is it working? Well, yes. But are you enjoying the bumpy, rattly ride? That’s another story.

Due to many reasons like peak traffic at rush hours, publicity campaigns that drive people to sites, a bug in software, database issues or the failure of third-party services, your online applications can become slow or non functional, disappoint visitors and prod them to leave and visit rival sites.

The answer is transaction monitoring services, which have two goals:

1. ensuring fast application performance and good user experience for visitors from anywhere around the globe
2. guaranteeing complete business functionality of applications 24 hours, seven days per week

Package Delivery, Transportation and Logistics Case Study

Lets consider how a Monitis Inc., customer, the world’s largest package delivery company and a leading global provider of specialized transportation and logistics, uses transaction monitoring to ensure the continuous availability of billing and reporting modules on the company’s website. They’ve used Monitis to monitor the following activities on their site every 5 minute, 24 hours per day:

1. open the website
2. logging in to the system, using a “test” user account
2. go to the payments’ page and search for available invoices
3. find the latest invoice and go to the details’ page and check certain content
4. go and check the history of all invoices
5. go to the report generation page
6. generate report of payments and check the content
7. download the report
8. sign out from the system

Monitis Transaction Monitoring Summary Report

The above Monitis report summarizes the end-user customer experience for the company, reporting peak, mid-point and low activity periods. To investigate low-activity periods, the company studied a Monitis detailed transaction report, shown below, and discovered that its Sign In/Sign Out and Invoice History pages were slow. As a result of studying this information, the company was able to pinpoint operational issues, optimize its database and, in the end, improve the user experience for its visitors and customers.

Continuous transactions monitoring ensures high functional availability for the application. You can read more Monitis blog posts about transactions monitoring best practices! Or Download Application and Transaction Monitoring Users Guide here.

Putting ICT (information and computer technologies) on the cloud is a phenomenon being undertaken by governments all over the world, and as a result, we’re becoming used to “citizen-centric” computing.

We now expect “services, more value, choice, transparency, and ease of use, all to be delivered through multiple channels,” according to a media piece on how Saas, cloud computing and self-service portals are transforming government websites.

Driving the trend is brand-spanking new technology, delivery systems and financial models.

Hey, here’s a thought: maybe cloud computing is driving the growth of democracy around the world! What an idea that is – as citizens’ expectations prod governments to re-think how they deliver information, provide digital conversations and services to Joe and Jane, Heinz and Gertrude or Pierre and Claudette.

In other words, as people have become used to the instantaneous nature of the Web, they now want answers and information pronto from their governments.

But government clouds need to be robust on the back end. Not least among primary features should be the capability to deliver information and communication via multiple channels. Because that’s what people use – different channels. Not everybody logs on via their desktop.

There are also issues around security and access and bandwidth, and governments, whether municipal, regional or international, should take these into consideration when choosing cloud providers.

You know, when you think of it, these are all issues that are key in private-sector cloud computing, too. Perhaps when they become less front-and-center in the private world, the change and positive results will spill over into the public.

What do you think? Have you had any good or horrible experience with government clouds?

Remember that IPO that Gomez had filed with the SEC in May 2008? Investors waited and waited for it to be finalized. Analysts waited and waited. The industry waited and waited.

Well, the recent acquisition of internet performance monitoring company Gomez by Compuware for $295 million in cash (expected to close in November) lets Gomez off the hook, in terms of the IPO. But, more importantly, the move makes Compuware the first APM vendor to offer last-mile web performance monitoring, combined with back-end datacenter management. Gomez will become an operating unit of Compuware, retain its name, most of its employees and will be fairly independent in managing the business.

The motivation for the deal for Compuware isn’t hard to understand. It specializes in monitoring and management of application performance from the datacenter perspective: the servers, databases and applications that reside on them. Compuware is betting on APM as its future.

Compuware added end-user monitoring when it bought APM provider Adlex in 2005. And with the addition of Gomez, Compuware can offer an additional layer of front-end performance management, tracking the performance of last-mile Internet connectivity, how websites perform in multiple browsers, as well as the performance of complex Web applications using rich interfaces such as AJAX. This means Compuware will be able to present its customers a unified view of performance data, from the datacenter to the Internet connection to the browser, all from one vendor.

I’d say this is pretty significant, as it’ll make Compuware the first APM player to offer all this in one package. Gomez also brings tools for pre-deployment load and performance testing to the mix.

And there are implications for cloud computing in this deal, too. The combined entity can monitor cloud user experiences and correlate them to the back-end performance of those services. That can help determine when cloud-bursting or deploying new virtualized infrastructure is needed.

I’m looking forward to seeing how the merged parties work together and what it brings in terms of services, front- and back-end, to companies. We’ll be watching!