As co-founder and CEO of ThousandEyes, I’d like to welcome each one of you to the ThousandEyes launch at GigaOM’s Structure conference.
The seeds
I met my co-founder Ricardo Oliveira many years ago during my Ph.D. in Computer Science at UCLA. We worked together on understanding and troubleshooting complex Internet routing issues and realized how hard it was to troubleshoot networks you don’t control. We saw that traditional performance management products were built for environments that could be instrumented, typical of a closed enterprise network, and that there was nothing out there that helped troubleshoot across different networks and across the Internet.
ThousandEyes was born
Our first task was to find a name that captured our mission, and we came up with ThousandEyes, partly because we wanted a name that conveyed the perception of seeing everything and partly because I joked that whatever we built had to be a thousand times better than Ricardo's pet project Cyclops, a network connectivity audit tool he built at UCLA and named after the mythical one-eyed creature. On Jan 2, 2010 ThousandEyes was born.
With a grant from National Science Foundation (NSF), we started focusing on troubleshooting Domain Name System (DNS) problems at Internet scale and landed some early customers including Verisign and Priceline. The more we talked with customers and prospects, the more we realized how much their world was changing. Almost everybody had started to adopt cloud applications and Software as a Service (SaaS) became a popular conversation topic among CIOs. By adopting cloud applications, these enterprises had opened up their entire network and inherited an entirely new breed of performance challenges, ones that traditional solutions were not built for.
The changing environment requires a new philosophy
Enterprise networks traditionally were closed and well defined but, with the adoption of cloud applications, these very enterprise networks were now starting to open up. The modern enterprise now relied on infrastructure outside their control, including the Internet as well as the cloud application provider’s network. Two fundamental things changed for these pro cloud enterprises: 1) They no longer knew what was causing performance problems with the critical cloud applications they relied on since these applications could not be instrumented akin to their on premise software and; 2) In the event there were problems, it was not as simple as walking down to the IT person , with troubleshooting now involving other parties outside your company's culture and processes. Traditional performance management products were creating barriers for performance management that both enterprises and cloud providers had to deal with.
At ThousandEyes, we wanted to break these barriers that restrict enterprises and cloud providers from solving performance problems faster. We believe the network layer is the key to troubleshoot diverse environments and we take a bottom-up network-centric approach that involves correlation to application layers to provide better diagnostics. Our techniques are designed to minimize the instrumentation and maximize the diagnostic power making them extremely powerful for troubleshooting cloud applications that cannot be instrumented.
We are excited to be launching today, fortunate to have a stellar team (growing rapidly), a great partner in Sequoia Capital and awesome customers. Welcome All!