AdventNet is a privately held company head quartered in Pleasanton, CA, founded in 1996. AdventNet offers forty two products in multiple market segments such as Infrastructure Management (includes server and network management), Application Management, Change Management and Software as a Service (SaaS).

The company’s offering in SaaS segment are Zoho office/collaboration services, On Demand CRM, Online DB with Business Intelligence (BI) capability, HR/Recruitment Management services, Project Management Services among others. A full list of services/products is available here and here. The Office/collaboration services and on demand CRM places AdventNet directly up against Google and Salesforce in the SaaS segment.

AdventNet’s strategy is to offer products that are simple to use, reliable, and affordable with excellent customer service. This strategy has been paying off pretty well for the last eleven years. Though the company follows an unconventional hiring process, it has been able to deliver compelling products while remaining profitable without seeking outside investment capital. The facts below speak for themselves:

1.The company boasts more than 8000 customers including the fortune elite.

2.They have a million users worldwide using their enterprise management products.

3.The above includes 3 out of every 5 Fortune 500 companies using their enterprise management software.

One of their most interesting products is Applications Manager, which can monitor over twenty five products covering an entire spectrum of management needs in an enterprise. For example Applications Manager can be used to monitor Apache Web Servers, Websphere, Weblogic, Glassfish application servers, MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server databases, ERP’s like SAP, Messaging provider such as Websphere MQ, colloboration portal software such as Sharepoint, Windows, Linux, and Solaris OS systems among others.

Applications Manager uses a decentralized master-slave model, for metrics collection and administration. For example an “Admin Node” represents the administration instance of Applications Manager and a “Managed Instance” is responsible for metrics collection from the servers that it is monitoring. However Applications Manager architecture is agent-less architecture, meaning there is no need to install any agent software on the host system to monitor Weblogic or the OS. This provides tangible benefits of easy installation, zero outage for production servers, among other benefits. For monitoring application availability and Web Services, synthetic transactions are used. Applications Manager provides the flexibility to do application monitoring while allowing the enterprises to leverage their existing alerting or monitoring software such as, CA Unicenter, BMC, IBM Tivoli or HP. A typical enterprise integration scenario is depicted below.

Mentioned below is an example scenario of the value proposition of using AdvnetNet products in application, infrastructure and service management space.

1.AdventNet’s Service Desk Plus can be used to manage the incidents (trouble tickets).

2.Problem management or end to end root-cause analysis can be done using one product, i.e. Applications Manager.

3.Proactive monitoring on application availability through synthetic transactions can be done using Applications Manager. Typically this is used by the management teams to see whether availability SLA’s are met. Applications Manager provides aesthetically appealing, intuitive and comprehensive reporting features.

4.The incident notification can be alerted through OpManager to Service Desk Plus.

5.The ITIL module can be used to manage the business impact of incidents. The ITIL module in combination with Asset Explorer can be used for Change Management for operational efficiency.

The company provides comprehensive coverage of enterprise management needs addressing all five segments depicted below. However it is interesting to note that the company doesn’t seem to have any analyst firm research papers on their management product portfolio though they compete with popular companies in the management space such as: HP, IBM, Computer Associates, BMC, MQSoftware, QFlex, IR 360, Keynote KITE and Hyperic, etc.

While the company is forward thinking in providing SaaS based offerings for availability monitoring, however, for further market penetration and to adapt to the changes in the technology market, the company should provide support for monitoring needs that arise due to virtualization. It would be interesting if the company were to host an elastic compute cloud (similar to Amazon EC2) and host the existing application and infrastructure management products as services. Such an offering would be compelling that might be game changing in the cloud computing space.

The product Applications Manager can be test driven over here.