Easy money
I don’t know what the sales of [[http://www.veeam.com/Veeam]] are like, but even after all these years doing software, I still find myself surprised at the kind of things people are ready to pay for. I mean, nothing against Veeam — if they’re making money, good for them!
So take a look at their products: the [[http://www.veeam.com/veeam_scanner.asp|scanner]] and the [[http://www.veeam.com/veeam_monitor.asp|monitor]]. Think about it — exactly what does their software do? It does some monitoring, presumably using VMWare API and/or existing OS tools and/or some inferencing. Its highly unlikely that they actually had to make //any// changes at all to VMWare source code itself. The scanning itself is almost VMWare agnostic. Atleast in the screenshot I can barely see anything which a regular network monitoring tool will not tell you. Even if there are some VMWare specific attributes, I would bet that they simply iterate through all the VMs using some provided API.
Where am I going with this? As far as I can tell, this software is only valuable because of its packaging. The nice GUI etc. For some reason that doesn’t often seem very compelling to me. But I’ve seen numerous examples of this elsewhere as well, where a customers found a product useful not because of revolutionary functionality but because of the packaging and presentation.
But the danger in building a business around these products is that the “big fish” (M$ or even VMWare) could one day decide that this is a cool feature that customers seem to be liking, and just start to bundle it with their products for free. Poof! Just like that, the small fish are endangered. The same thing happened with Google Calendar and Kiko. Or with M$ and thousands of third party software manufacturers back in the day.
//Differentiation// is important, but only when its not easily replicatable.
Hi Diwaker Gupta,
Thank you for your evaluation of Veeam Monitor. I’d like to provide some feedback on your post.
You wrote:
It does some monitoring, presumably using VMWare API and/or existing OS tools and/or some inferencing. Its highly unlikely that they actually had to make any changes at all to VMWare source code itself. Even if there are some VMWare specific attributes, I would bet that they simply iterate through all the VMs using some provided API. Where am I going with this? As far as I can tell, this software is only valuable because of its packaging. The nice GUI etc. For some reason that doesn’t often seem very compelling to me. But I’ve seen numerous examples of this elsewhere as well, where a customers found a product useful not because of revolutionary functionality but because of the packaging and presentation.
You are not quite right here. Actually, we are not using any VMware or OS tools at all. Instead, we have created our own kernel driver that can monitor almost any resource on your PC. That gave us great monitoring abilities. For example, there is no other tool that can show you the time your application has been using a specific device (disk, cd-rom, flash drive, etc). Moreover, this driver gives us the ability to monitor almost any application, which we are going to use in our future projects (perhaps, we will start with monitoring notepad.exe).
As for packaging and usability, it’s definitely the crucial point for any software. We have succeeded to create a clear and friendly administrator-type interface. I’m glad you like it. In fact, a lot of companies build their products through packaging like, for example, Microsoft and Raxco companies.
You wrote:
But the danger in building a business around these products is that the “big fish” (M$ or even VMWare) could one day decide that this is a cool feature that customers seem to be liking, and just start to bundle it with their products for free. Poof! Just like that, the small fish are endangered.
Yes, you are right. It’s not that easy when you are sharing the same pool with a “big fish”. However, being a “small fish” can also be an advantage. We are smaller in size than VMware but more focused on virtual machines monitoring. We have already made a step ahead of VMware. In the nearest future we are going to maintain our success by creating versions for Microsoft and SWsoft products. In fact, our success allows a “big fish” to gain additional profit. Focusing on VM monitoring, we fill in blank spaces in VM market, thus reinforcing VMware virtual environment. Now VMware can take advantage of a useful application specially designed for their own product.
*@maxim*: Thanks for the feedback! Frankly speaking I was really surprised and happy to see this comment. Thats what I love about blogs — they make it so easy for companies to reach out on such an individual level, so kudos there!
I agree with pretty much all points you make. I wasn’t aware that Veeam uses a kernel driver. So does Veeam work with the ESX server or just VMWare workstation? I’m just curious whether the driver runs within the hypervisor or within the host operating system.
Good luck!
It’s great when people are interested in your product.
Veeam Monitor can monitor any of Windows-based VMware products (Server, Workstation, Player). Linux-Based ones like ESX will be supported in future.
The kernel driver works within the host OS to be able to monitor resources utilization of the Vmware (including the virtualization system itself). Thus, it can show the VM performance graph for any guest OS(linux, unix, windows, etc.).
BTW, we are going to release Veeam Monitor 1,5 soon. It will also show the host OS resources usage (host services and applications). That will make the performance picture more complete.
Thanks for asking!
*@maxim*: ah ok, so Veeam is for hosted platforms right now? That makes much more sense. Does it work with Linux as the host OS?
At present, Veeam supports only Windows-based host system. Hopefully, next year we will support Linux-based host system as well.