To kick off our celebration of our first five years, we asked ScienceLogic founders Dave Link, Richard Chart and Chris Cordray for their thoughts and memories on events leading to today’s milestone. How and why did they set out on this venture? What happened along the way – expected and unexpected? Why were they successful in times when other new (and established) businesses have come and gone?

How did you three put together this team?

We all worked together at a large Managed Service Provider for a couple of years before leaving to start ScienceLogic, so we all knew each other and knew our collective strengths. More importantly, each of us had worked with network management tools on some level (sales and marketing, engineering and product development), and knew first-hand all of the customer pain points, from every perspective. So we left and began rapidly figuring out how to build a better network management solution based upon our real world operational experience..

Dave: One interesting aspect is that our areas of expertise don’t overlap, which has contributed to our success. Chris is excellent with developing the product front-end and interface, Richard handled the backend architecture and engineering and I focused on the technical business side of sales and marketing. Our roles have been to build a product that works well and that provides real value to operations teams that experience the same day to day frustrations that we felt.

Whose idea was it to start the company?

Dave: It was really a collective effort. We were all passionate about “getting it right” and not just starting a company. We knew the industry need and between us, we had the knowledge and skill sets to address all of the right aspects of developing a product and a building a business around it.

What process did you go through to get started?

Richard: From the beginning we knew the type of solution the market needed and we knew that we wanted to build it as an appliance. From different vantage points, we had each experienced the effects of long, difficult and expensive installations that still exist with traditional network tools. Every install has unique variations: there are always different server types, varying hardware and software versions, different patches installed, and on and on. Every installation was time consuming and unpredictable. We knew that an appliance model would address all of these variables and save a lot of time on how quickly customers could achieve immediate value.

The harder decisions were around actually starting the business, assessing the market and of course determining the product pricing.

EM7 completely flips the traditional model of complex, lengthy and expensive deployments. How did you convince others that the EM7 Meta-Appliance product was valid?

Dave: Yes, EM7 totally disrupts the traditional model for network management. While others take a narrow approach, we intentionally designed EM7 to focus on the broad problem – managing the data center. How do you cover a variety of technologies and make sure they work seamlessly together? The vision was to make it easier, not harder, for customers.

Chris: I have to give it to Dave – very early on, he realized the power of a demo. If Dave could get in front of someone, he’d make them a believer. He’d use the Peter Falk/Columbo technique of “let me show you one more thing.” It was very effective. It’s getting easier, but even today people sometimes have to see EM7 in action before they become believers.

Can you describe the early days of running a new business?

Dave: ScienceLogic is a classic case of entrepreneurship. For the first year we worked out of our basements. We kept the costs low in every conceivable way and spent the first year developing the product before we even made a sale.

Chris: We stayed at lots of odd places when we were on the road, took cheap flights with multiple layovers and purchased lots of our first test equipment on eBay. This was during the dot-com bust so there was lots of equipment for sale on eBay, really cheap!

Richard: The amount of equipment I had in my house was absolutely crazy. Back then, servers were huge – I had a Cisco 6509 Catalyst, a Compaq Proliant DL380, Brocade switch, IBM Netfinity 4500R, and tons of other machines.

Chris: I had to install a new circuit box at home because I was blowing breakers. I remember when that 6509 crashed, we revived it and it died again. The second death was final.

So you started in your houses – what was your first office space?

Dave: My friend, the CEO at Ernst & Young Technology had a few extra cubes and a data center in their office that they graciously allowed us to use. Their help was an important step in helping us really formalize the business. We started doing well and adding people, but ironically, their company was downsizing. Before long, many of their original YET people were gone and the ScienceLogic team kept growing in to the open cubes.

Our first leased space was converted warehouse space in Chantilly, VA that once housed an internet radio station. It was cool – it had a large salt water fish tank, a loft, a spiral staircase and a Star Trek door that retracted into the walls with the customary lights and “whooshing” sound.

We outgrew the Chantilly space, leading to our current office in Reston, VA.

Who was the first ScienceLogic customer?

Our first paying customer was Martins Point Health Care. We deployed there in July 2004 and are pleased to say they continue to be a ScienceLogic customer. Other early (and still) EM7 customers include Navy Knowledge Online and the Department of Transportation. Nearly all of our customers are still actively using EM7 and renewing their maintenance.

Where do you see the company in the next 5, 10 or 15 years?

Well, our revenue has doubled year-over-year in each of the last three years, so of course we’d like to continue to grow like that or even faster. In five years we’ve gone from three founders to the point where Dave does not know everyone’s fondest childhood memory. We’ll continue to scale our growth to cover the demands of our growing customer base.

Where do you see the industry going over the coming years?

Chris: IT is always moving and gaining in complexity, so network management is also becoming more complicated. There’s increasing diversity, new standards, virtualization and cloud computing. All of these are today’s technologies. Customers have a mix of the old and the new, so EM7 has to accommodate and support both.

Richard: Each generation of products has a new set of ways to monitor, but the “old” doesn’t go away. Even when a new, hot technology comes along, the old technologies still need to be supported. We work to ensure EM7 keeps up with both.

Dave: After five years we’re just hitting our stride and we’re just now reaching the tipping point in awareness of ScienceLogic and EM7. We’re all still passionate about the product and as Chris and Rich said, there’s still a lot do. We’ll continue disrupting the market with EM7. Our vision hasn’t changed, and with the increasing levels of automation that customers demand, the market needs are greater than ever. Our future is as bright, or brighter, than ever and we’ll continue to be looking for smart ways to automate traditionally manual IT Operations processes.

What’s your advice for someone interested in starting their own business?

Chris: Be passionate. That’s what has gotten me through the tough times. I didn’t really appreciate this thought when I heard others say it before. But it’s very true.

Richard: I agree. We met and talked with lots of people who told us, “That’s been done before.” But we kept going because we truly believed in what we were doing and we knew that while our approach was different, that it would be successful.

Richard: Be fearless. You can’t be too nervous and you need to be able to expect and handle the stress because it will be there. You have to learn to accept the stressful times as a necessary part of the process of starting out on your own.

Dave: Know your niche from the beginning and give potential customers a compelling reason to trust you and really benefit from your solution. You have to know the problem, see the gap and have a clear and consistent vision of how to solve the problem. Then you have to execute. If you don’t build your team with “doers” you won’t make it.

Chris: It helps to have friends. ScienceLogic was built on friendships and relationships, starting with the three of us. If you look at our team, most of our hires are referrals – people who developed and maintained great connections with other great people throughout their careers. Maintain your connections and keep in touch with your network of friends.

New life for dead Tempe network? Another firm has expressed interest in buying the pennies on the dollar assets that remain of the former Kite Networks installation in Tempe from the firm that financed the venture as long as they can negotiate a new, more favorable deal with the city for mounting and removal rights. CTC, Inc., which the East Valley Tribune reports runs networks in the Kansas City, Mo., area, thinks there's an opportunity. The article notes that reception problems were due in part to the prevalence of stucco in Tempe, common in the southwest. Stucco walls layer plaster or other materials on a wire mesh for strength that turns a house into a bit of an accidental Faraday cage, partially shielding the home from electromagnetic radiation. (Could I go so far to say that Tempe's network could be a phoenix? Ouch.)

Wake up, you darn computer: Intel's new Remote Wake motherboards won't work with Wi-Fi, it's important to note. The feature, announced today, will let an incoming VoIP call (the articles all say "phone call over the Internet") to wake a computer, as long as the call comes from a particular source. Of course, the standard SIP protocol for VoIP doesn't have the kind of security and integrity that would allow this; Intel has to overcome the problem with network address translation that renders most computer unreachable from outside the local network without a separate service like GoToMyPC or LogMeIn; and it will only work for computers connected via Ethernet to a local network, because Wi-Fi is off when a computer sleeps, while Ethernet can remain lightly active. I don't have the protocol details yet, but there's long been a Wake on LAN protocol that required support in a router, operating system, and Ethernet card; Intel may be leveraging this.

ScienceLogic: Mike, what’s your background working with network and management system tools?

Mike Lawson: Before joining Apptis, I worked for the Air Force, mainly in satellite communications for almost nine years. I’m probably most familiar with HP OpenView and BMC Remedy. I managed a team that used them but wasn’t involved in tool selection; like many other federal IT workers, we didn’t have a choice of tools because there were existing enterprise licenses and maintenance contracts.

I also saw a large systems integrator do a full Remedy/Crystal Systems/OpenView installation. It took 6 weeks to stand up and customize to meet just the basic monitoring requirements, and it cost something like half a million dollars. At the time, I thought that wasn’t bad and was a pretty typical experience.

ScienceLogic: Coming from where you did, what’s your take on EM7?

Mike Lawson: Honestly, I didn’t believe that EM7 could really do all that it claimed. In many ways, it was the complete opposite of what I had seen first-hand with other monitoring solutions. Could it really cover that much functionality? At relatively much lower cost to the customer and without the licensing nightmare?

That quickly changed when I needed to understand the system enough to run it at a customer’s site. I went back over the training docs I received during my initial training class and jumped in; now, 6 months later, I’m the EM7 expert and can tell you that it delivers on all those promises. (But I still need to show people to get them to believe it too)

I preach the “EM7 gospel” and when anyone wants to talk monitoring, I ask about the universal pain points: cost, maintenance contracts and licensing, and then I explain EM7. The cost difference is real; the solution is based on capacity, so there’s no licensing and it’s easy to use. They are shocked to learn that they can buy multiple EM7 appliances and years of maintenance for what they paid for most other tools.

ScienceLogic: Apptis won the contract for monitoring aboard the USNS Mercy. We love that you’re using EM7 for one of the Navy’s hospital ships. Can you tell us more?

Mike Lawson: The USNS Mercy is a Military Sealift Command hospital ship. Some stats:

• 849 feet long (nearly the size of a football field)
• 12 fully-equipped operating rooms, a 1,000 bed hospital facility, digital radiological services, a diagnostic and clinical laboratory, a pharmacy, an optometry lab, a CAT scan and two oxygen producing plants
• Crew: 61 civilian mariners, 956 Naval medical staff, and 259 Naval support staff

The USNS recently departed on a five-month humanitarian mission in the Western Pacific and Southeast Asia in support of Pacific Partnership 2008. The partnership provides international medical, dental and engineering teams this summer to provide humanitarian support and conduct joint, combined, and cooperative Civil-Military Operations in order to improve regional stability and build partner capacity to respond to natural disasters and pandemic.

For the most part, the ship’s network is self-contained, but can also use a landline when docked. The network covers 400 devices, including Windows/Exchange servers and VMware for server virtualization. Prior to using EM7, none of the monitoring was integrated; each system was independently monitored through individual vendor-specific consoles.

Out of the box, EM7 provided integrated systems, application and network management for all network gear, applications and virtual machines in one solution. We didn’t have to do a lot of customization – EM7 includes best-practice based thresholds, event and monitoring templates and this covered what USNS Mercy needed to monitor.

ScienceLogic: You’re a systems integrator with a very useful “customer point of view” when it comes to looking at tools. From that perspective, can you share what you think are the biggest benefits that EM7 provides?

Mike Lawson: First of all, EM7 stands up right away. We’re talking days, not weeks. In contrast to the lengthy installation of OpenView and Remedy I witnessed during my military career, I was able to configure, customize, and implement the EM7 solution for the USNS Mercy in three days.

Second, it’s easy to train people on and the support is outstanding. This judgment is from first-hand experience. Right before the USNS Mercy departed on its latest voyage, the system administrator I had trained on EM7 left, so I had all of a day to train some new EM7 admins. I prepared a seven-page “cheat sheet” and over a 3-hour conference call, we walked through the entire EM7 solution; I haven’t gotten a support call since.

And when a problem did crop up with a device being discovered incorrectly, ScienceLogic was very responsive. We contacted ScienceLogic support on a Saturday and they created and emailed us a video to help troubleshoot the same day. Within 30 seconds of watching the video, the problem was resolved.

Finally, EM7 helps us be good stewards of the government’s money. This is very important to me personally and to Apptis as a company. Because EM7 is cheaper and deploys so quickly and easily, you might think that it’s just the opposite of what a system integrator would want to use. But that’s short-term thinking. We believe in deliver the most value for customers every time. It’s what creates trust and long-term relationships with our customers. Instead of that half million spent on standing up the solution and basic setup, I’d much rather (and I know the customer would rather) spend that on fine-tuning or extending the solution to do much, much more.

As a former government employee, I know what it’s like to use a tool that doesn’t fit my needs. EM7 proves that the best solution can totally break the old model of costly, lengthy installations. EM7 has the right model: the right solution and the right price delivered as an appliance that is easy to deploy, train on and use.

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