Happy Birthday to Us - Hyperic Turns 3

March 6th, 2007 javier

A lot has happened in the past 3 years. We bought the rights to software we developed at Covalent, and the customers that came with it. We believed this problem was bigger then anyone recognized at the time, and we believed in ourselves and in the software we had started to solve it. Starting a company on your own, with no backing and several big, demanding customers is a challenge, to say the least. We knew the domain, had lots of ideas, but the customers kept the lights on and needed to be served above all else. 2 years slipped by quickly, and it was still the same 5 guys building, supporting, testing and selling the software to a handful of customers.

That changed this past year - we signed some bigger OEM deals where JBoss, MySQL and MuleSource are now licensing and reselling our software for us, and making their software more manageable in the process. We got some funding from Benchmark and Accel, which enabled us to grow, and to go Open Source last July, something we had wanted to do since day one, but didn’t have the resources or the time to really do it. And now today, I sit here in our new office, surrounded by my fellow other 4 founders, and 15 new faces, celebrating our success and those of the hundreds of enterprises that now use our software.

A lot has changed over the past 3 years, and my fellow founders agree. This afternoon, my marketing sidekick, Stacey, played reporter around the office and summarized the reactions of my fellow founders nicely.

Doug MacEachern, CTO

“The roots of my career are in Open Source, with 7 years on Apache and mod_perl before I started on this project. When I started, the thing that appealed to me about this project the most was that it was a lot like why I thought Apache was such a popular project. It is an extensive problem which applies to a really wide audience, which makes it useful. But also, on the developer side it never gets boring. There are always new challenges. The past year has been great for me, because prior to the funding and going open source, we were frugal with all our time and money - it was all spent on existing customers. We wanted to go Open Source, but we never had the resources. Last year we made the switch, and while customers are still an absolute priority, we have more resources to expand and grow and support a community and expand to new stuff. A year ago, I never would have had the time to work on virtualization. This year, I got to work on both VMware and XenSource. That’s just cool.”

Charles Lee, VP of Engineering

“I think back to 3 years ago, and why we started this company, and I am pretty proud that the purpose is still the same. We saw this problem of web infrastructure management being unaddressed, and we went for it. What we didn’t see is how Web 2.0 and SOA would accelerate this problem so much in the past few years, and its really exciting that we are not only validated in the problem we set out to do, but we were ahead of a major trend that is now affecting so many companies.”

Ryan Morgan, Chief Architect

“I was motivated years ago by seeing the widespread failure of products in the system management space that took an army of consultants and engineers onsite to get going. I wanted to fix that by building that better mousetrap that sets itself up with reasonable defaults and real results right away. At Covalent, we basically got to do that - but only to version 1.0. By starting Hyperic, we got to do a lot more. That means that now I hear from customers about how they can’t believe that we can find all this information and see metrics right away. I love that they’re blown away by that, and that we continue to solve that problem better every day.”

John Sachs, Client Services

“Systems management is a fun and exciting area. We came at this knowing the problem, but perhaps not realizing how big it would be today. But we were confident in our abilities, and that anyone who tried our software would be blown away. My job is to work with customers in support, and I would say 50% of the time I see them live, or get them on the phone, I hear a great story about how HQ averted some disaster in their IT department. That always feels good.”

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