....Luminate develops performance monitoring software for storage-intensive applications and operating environments.
Luminate is an applications performance management software company with shipping products and net-based services focused on the SAP R/3, Oracle and SQL environments. It appears to complement EMC's minority investment in Precise Software, which is the co-developer of EMC's Database Tuner for the Oracle and DB2 environments. Databases are the foundation layer for around 70% of all enterprise applications.
The Outlook for Enterprise System Management Software
The enterprise system management software market grew to $13.8 billion in 2000 and is expected to increase to $24.9 billion in 2005. This represents a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.5 percent for the forecast period, according to new research from IDC.
Of the 10 functional markets that comprise the enterprise system management software market, performance management software and backup and archive software are the largest, with each grabbing about 19 percent market share. IDC projects both of these markets will increase at a 12 percent CAGR over the forecast period.
"The continued growth of e-business, widespread use of Web components, and the move toward Web-based tools are all factors that will drive revenue increase in performance management software over the next five years," says Tim Grieser, research director of IDC's enterprise system management software service. "This represents a growing revenue opportunity for both systems and applications performance management software vendors."
According to IDC, demand for software that can simplify and automate the management of the storage environment will also occur over the forecast period. "The demand for more sophisticated storage management software will accelerate over the next five years as storage networks are more widely deployed to support the continuing, relentless growth of enterprise storage capacity," said Bill North, research director of IDC's storage software service.
dmreview.com
This is clearly a very early stage market, which probably explains why EMC was able to snag the company for only $50M in cash.
I like this deal because of the way it combines Luminate's top-down approach (application performance management) with EMC's bottom-up approach (storage performance management) to information-centricity.
EMC increased its storage engineering head count from 1,000 in 1999 to 2,000 in 2000 to around 3,000 in mid-2000 partly by using each of its acquisitions as a tactical recruiting base to draft highly specialized talent that would otherwise not gravitate to a big company. This acquisition will probably continue that trend.
Luminate's knowledge-base service adds intelligence
By Barb Goldworm
Network World Network Systems Management Newsletter, 04/19/00
Last week's issue of this newsletter talked about several emerging solutions to help address the increasing challenge of management, given the chronic shortage of senior IT staff. Dennis has also recently discussed outsourced managed services and managed service provider (MSP) offerings, more from a network perspective, specifically looking at SilverBack Technologies' InfoCare offering. Another interesting company to watch is the new and improved Luminate.
Luminate cut its teeth on managing enterprise resource planning applications with an SAP management tool that competes directly with Envive's management suite, and to some extent, BMC Patrol and SAP's CCMS. With many years experience in SAP management, along with the practical knowledge that comes from experience, Luminate has begun a transformation that could provide significant benefits for users - SAP and otherwise.
Envive and Luminate have recently announced products that incorporate their knowledge, expertise and best practices into their respective products. With practical suggestions, rules of thumb and the intelligence to call out useful information for specific situations, both products act as "senior advisors" to the IT staff. The benefit is particularly significant to the less senior, less experienced staff members who have responsibility for SAP management but may not understand the meaning, much less the nuances, behind the information displayed by a management tool. With a broad knowledge base as a foundation, these management tools can not only call out the exceptions and problems but also give advice on what to do about them.
Luminate takes the idea several steps further. First, Luminate has taken the position that their "value-add" is in the intelligence, not the reporting. As part of this position, they assert the following:
Management data is and should be free. Most vendors agree with this. The data is created by all the infrastructure components as part of what they do and is freely available for others to mine.
Tools to manipulate and report on the data should be free. This is one assertion that many would dispute, since this is the major revenue stream for most management vendors. Nonetheless, Luminate, with its MAMBA products, provides a free tool with a good user interface to interpret management information. Its MAMBA product for SAP has been available since last November and has received a strong positive reaction from early users. MAMBA for Windows NT was released in March.
The value-add should come from the knowledge base and is best provided as a service. (Note there has been a subtle name change from Luminate Software to Luminate, reflecting the new service orientation.)
Luminate recently announced it would provide a management service called Luminate.Net. Customers of this new service collect their own data, run MAMBA for free real-time information and then connect to Luminate's service to leverage the central knowledge base (Intelligence Center). This adds intelligence into the customer's management process, including a daily e-mail with a hot list and relevant information from the knowledge base. Luminate provides the tools for free, charges for the knowledge base as a service, and "advises" the customer on how to manage and address the problems called out by the tools. As with SilverBack, this is not a completely outsourced managed service - the actual management is not provided for the customer. Luminate's focus is on using its knowledge base to add intelligence and act as the senior advisor to a potentially junior person within the customer organization who does the management.
The other interesting part of Luminate's repositioning is that it is now going beyond SAP. The MAMBA interface, which got high marks from users of SAP, was released for NT in March and announced for Oracle (scheduled to ship in May). Luminate.Net for NT is scheduled for July, and Luminate.Net for Oracle is slated for September. While it may take time to get all the NT and Oracle nuances down, Luminate's graphical user interface features have been strong in the past and should move well to other environments. Likewise, the knowledge base will take time to catch up with the SAP intelligence.
google.com |
