Private Company Spotlight: Akimbi Systems
In my daily research through the blogosphere, I recently came across a column by Daniel Lewin [via Don Dodge] that discusses innovative startups [who, not surprisingly, all happen to be .Net devotees]. Putting aside the trite Xmas references and the highly Microsoft-centric approach, I found Lewin's list worthwhile in its own right. Coincidentally, several of the companies mentioned are in spaces I, as an investor in public companies, pay close attention to and know a bit about already. Others I look forward to getting to know thanks in part to Daniel's recommendation. In Lewin's own words...
Every company on our list has taken advantage of the .NET framework to bring their products and services to market, and it has contributed wildly (OK, merrily) to their success. But enough about us. On to those incredible companies doing extraordinary things. Forget Comet, Cupid, Donner, and Blitzen; these companies may not be flying through the snowy night skies, but they are high-flying in a very good way, too...
One of the companies mentioned, Akimbi Systems, has been on my watch list for some time, having been brought to my attention by the fine folks at Gartner. My industry contacts has since confirmed that the Akimbi team is making quite a few people in the software testing and development world take notice.
Akimbi was founded in 2004 by James Phillips and Xun Wilson Huang and has raised $11.3 million via two rounds of financing. Hummer Winblad led the initial round along with Partech International and Stanford. Mayfield Fund joined [and led] an $8 million Series B round last month [November 2005].
So what does Akimbi do, and why all the buzz?...The company puts a new spin on virtualization
More specifically, Akimbi leverages the growing popularity of virtual machines to help streamline the process of software design testing and quality assurance. From Akimbi's website:
Building on virtual machine technology from Microsoft or VMware, Akimbi Slingshot enables software developers and QA engineers to suspend, then capture to a shared storage library, the complete state of a “complex configuration” – that is, a collection of running, interdependent computer systems that span multiple machines. Over time, an organization builds up its library, including test scenarios, production environments, and customer configurations. When a configuration in the library is later needed for development or test purposes, for example to test a new software build in the context of a customer production environment, Akimbi Slingshot can instantly deploy the entire configuration to the best available resources in a pool of managed servers – exactly as it was captured, running and ready for use.
Akimbi Slingshot-managed capture-and-restore operations literally take seconds. What would normally be a painstaking, multi-hour exercise (gathering machines, installing operating systems, installing and configuring applications, establishing inter-machine connections) can now be done with a single click of the mouse.
What's are the pain points being addressed?
- Reduction of overhead -- Server resource allocation has long been an inefficient process, particularly for processes like software design, testing and deployment which are inherently cyclical. For example, when a new application is about to be deployed across the enterprise, the QA/Testing group needs to requisition massive server capacity to run detailed scenario analysis before going live. In many organizations, that means huge server farms sit idly by much of the time, waiting to be deployed by the QA/Testing teams at unspecified intervals. In other [often smaller] organizations, they simply don't have the capital resources to keep servers shuddered on hold...so the QA/Testing teams are forced to fight for available processing space, often at off peak hours [i.e., when core processes aren't being utilized]. Akimbi seeks to reduce this overhead issue by allowing the creation and tear down of complex, multi-machine environments virtually that can be saved and re-deployed at will.
- Reduction of development costs and cycle times -- If Akimbi does what's promised, the cost savings could be tremendous, particularly for larger development organizations. The current method of QA testing and debugging in pre-deployment is cumbersome to say the least. The complexity of production environments is only going to increase as we move more into a web services/SOA environment...
- Multiple databases [e.g., DB2, Oracle, SQL]
- Multiple app servers [e.g., Apache, JBoss, Websphere, Weblogic]
- Multiple hardware configurations [e.g., client/server, virtual, Web-based UIs, mainframe]
- Multiple display paradigms [e.g., mobile, dedicated terminals, desktops, servers]
- Multiple security layers
- Multiple web interfaces [e.g., Firefox, IE, Opera]
- Multiple messaging and communication protocols
To be able to simulate disparate environments, and then freeze and capture the resultant outcomes of those environments into a library for later re-use allows QA and testing to become ITERATIVE in ways that simply weren't feasible in times past.
Akimbi is still an early stage company, but they're making headway and several public companies in the systems management and QA testing space have [or should be] taking notice. I can think of a number of companies that would do well to consider a partnership with Akimbi at a minimum. Another issue to consider is how proprietary their solution is [clearly they are a first mover, but the length of their lead in this space is something I'm less confident in declaring]. Will the VM players [i.e., EMC via VMWare, Microsoft, Open Sourcers via Xen] extend their solutions in this direction? Time will tell, but Akimbi is helping shape what could be an important evolution of the software design and testing process.
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