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SPOTLIGHT:
INTERVIEW WITH INTEGRIEN CEO, AL EISAIAN
By Jennifer Beever
Integrien
won the SCSC Software Developer of the Year award for 2005. The
Software Developer of the Year award is give to the company that
shows the most market acceptance, innovation, functionality and
usability, and best practices in product development. Interviewer
Jennifer Beever talked with Integrien CEO Al Eisaian (pronounced
"E-sigh-on") about the company and its recent success.
Tell us
about your company
AE: Integrien is the leading provider of integrity management
software. Basically, we help IT organizations predict and prevent
problems in their IT systems before they can cause negative business
impact. We combine several technologies including auto-discovery,
auto-thresholding and dynamic correlation analytics to predict
problems before they happen. We help business and IT unify their
views and move them from a fire-fighting mode to a fire prevention
mode. Companies that use our product run more reliably and are
more predictable - they gain control over the complexity that
is prevalent in the modern IT environments.
What is the pain you solve for businesses?
We go across all the silos. The modern data center is comprised
of the networking stack or silo, the server silo, the operating
system silo, the middleware silo, the database silo and the applications
silo. In order to deliver services that generate revenue for the
business, all the silos have to work together. Existing tools
allow you to work within each silo and find out what is happening
in each layer. But, the majority of the problems occur at the
inter-linking points of these stacks or silos. Hardware failures
don't really matter anymore, because there's so much hardware
redundancy built into systems now. We provide a holistic, end-to-end
view as it's relevant to the mission critical transactions of
the company.
What makes you successful?
There are a few trends that support our success in the marketplace.
First, the average tenure of a CIO has been reduced to 2-3 years,
because most CIOs merely manage elements of their domain rather
than focusing on providing competitive advantage to the business.
CIOs who are forward-thinking and looking for predictive methods
of managing their environment will be able to grow into full-fledged
and core member of the Executive suite. Second, your IT ecosystem
is no longer your IT ecosystem, because of outsourcing and partnering
with third parties who have core competencies. In this outsourced
environment, how do you maintain integrity? The third, and probably
one of the most important developments since 2001, is more regulation
- not only Sarbanes-Oxley, not only HIPAA, but regulation around
the globe. IT is a big part of this. For instance a major Fortune
500 company's CIO is going to jail because of compliance issues.
Fourth, the legacy solutions haven't kept up with the problem
set that has been emerging.
In terms of benefits, we give the CIO their control back. If we
ask them what is in their environment, how many issues have they
had in the last month, how many of those issues impacted the business,
and what was the financial impact, they don't know! They don't
know because they don't have a big picture view of their environment
and frankly they don't have the right solutions and technologies.
Integrien's Alive 5.0 has been purpose-built to provide these
benefits.
We help them align their IT expenditures with business initiatives.
With Integrien, they can tell their team where issues will come
up and what the impact will be on the business. We give them the
ability to predict. They can proactively work with the rest of
the organization when issues come up. We also save them a lot
of money, because we've abstracted the layers of complexity and
brought consumer-usability to an enterprise software solution.
Most often within a couple of days we can show them their holistic
environment.
Can you give an example of a customer's success?
One of our customers uses us to manage their CRM implementations
globally: 15,000 users, highly mission-critical application, users
around the globe. They were constantly in the firefighting mode
and they didn't know what their issues were. They've gone from
having sketchy visibility into uptime and performance of the entire
application to knowing that they have 99.99% uptime and availability.
This company has to proactively and predictively manage that environment,
otherwise they are in a world of hurt, because this application
is used by the folks that generate the revenues that the company
lives on. They no longer have to have twelve people monitoring
the systems - they have two. That's the type of mission critical
applications that we work with. All of our customers continue
to embrace complex distributed computing, and more recently SOA
(service-oriented-architecture) which is even more complex for
manageability purposes. That's why we believe that Integrien is
going to be one of the most important companies of this decade
because we have a 4-year head-start and have predicted the big
trends a little earlier.
What's your advantage over competitors?
We eliminate the need to deploy agents on every device you have
out there. The rate of change is so rapid, that agents become
obsolete quickly and then have to be replaced or have massive
compatibility issues. It is an endless problem of having to upgrade
agents and do compatibility testing. We also eliminate the need
to set static thresholds, which tend to be one of the causes of
"alert storms," where people have put arbitrary thresholds
because they don't know what's the right threshold. We have a
dynamic thresholding feature that establishes a dynamic, statistical
baseline of the normal mode of operation for each environment.
A correlation engine receives the information and is able to weed
out the symptomatic alerts that create the alert storms and just
give IT Operations the root-cause problem alerts.
How did you come to start Integrien?
Dr. Mazda Marvasti was our Chief Technology Officer at LowerMyBills.com.
I asked him to go out and find us a tool that would ensure end-to-end
integrity of our systems that drove our revenue. Oftentimes the
transaction path was hitting our partners - we were a lead generator
company. Our partners would say, "No, we only received 500
transactions." But our system would show that they received
700. We also wanted to provide a view to the partners into our
ecosystem, showing them what was going on. Secondly, a lot of
the partners were second tier partners who had horrible IT systems.
He went out and looked at a bunch of solutions and said, "It
can't be done." I thought that if there's no such thing out
there then that's a great opportunity for us to build it. I knew
then that there were at least 100 online businesses that we could
sell this to.
That was after the dot bomb and around the time of 9-11. What
did you do?
We did consulting around the technology for about 2 years. In
2003, we switched back to the product strategy and introduced
version 3.0 after refining the product with the help of our consulting
work.
How big is this market space now?
It's a space of a few billion, depending on who you listen to.
For example, in just one division of GE - Energy Services - I
can tell them that not only will we provide them with integrity
for their own IT, but also for all the customers that they've
sold product into. The integrity management market is simply as
big as all the complex IP-based systems and technologies that
are being spawn every day. All these complex systems will need
manageability and integrity to deliver their value to their customers.
I see a vast opportunity for Integrien in the coming months and
years if we continue to execute and innovate.
Were you too early in this space?
In the first two years of our business, I have to admit we were
not very astute with our messaging. Our initial messaging was,
"we're agentless, we're easy, we go across" … please
let us show you.
What did you do to change?
We hired Phil Ressler, who is a venture partner at Clearstone
- a 25 year software veteran. He helped us come up with a new
name, craft a message - we took a quarter or two and stopped most
activity. That's what allowed us to refine and polish - actually
transform - how we communicate with the market. We also hired
Yankee Group and Gartner and IDC and did a lot of strategy sessions
with them to clarify what the market is, what are their views,
etc. We worked to understand where the pain points were, and we
did an interview with 50 CIOs/Directors of Operation. We ran a
survey with Sys Admin magazine with an additional 225 respondents.
In short: heavy-duty market research and synthesis.
What's been your greatest success with Integrien?
When we first tested the dynamic thresholding and the prediction
technology in a customer environment, and the darn thing worked!
And of course raising $6.5 million dollars was also loads of fun.
What would you tell other software industry CEOs?
I take my hat off to all the entrepreneurs out there. You have
to have a lot of resilience and make a lot of sacrifices. I want
to see people chase their dreams and never give up. That's why
California is such a great place to live-because of the entrepreneurs
who don't give up. If they fail, then they try again. It's not
always about "what's in it for me?' it's about "how
can I serve?" Your customers are the reason you exist so
focus on how you can serve them and everything else will fall
into place. Not easy but definitely a heck of a lot of fun.
Integrien
Corporation is the leading provider of integrity management solutions.
Integrien's products and services allow enterprise IT organizations
to predict, prevent and heal problems in technology-based business
systems. As a result, Integrien customers experience higher-quality
business operations that are more efficient, continuously available,
and far easier to maintain. For more information visit http://www.integrien.com
or contact Kevin Strehlo (949-788-0555 or kevin.strehlo@integrien.com).
Interviewer
and Software Council member Jennifer Beever spent 14 years in
the ERP software industry prior to founding her marketing consulting
firm, New Incite, in 1997. Jennifer helps companies create and
implement systematic, planned marketing strategies. Contact Jennifer
at 818-347-4248 or jenb@newincite.com
