The advent of cloud computing has enabled many small businesses to take off. However, as small businesses grow, their data management needs multiply. While there are many open-source DevOps tools that small businesses could use for data management, such tools are often found inefficient while handling larger datasets.
This gap in the existing DevOps tools is what led former DevOps Manager at Paypal, Kenneth Jiang, and former Product Manager at Paypal, Gülin Yilmaz, to set up OpsViz.
Kenneth, who has more than 17 years experience in back-end systems engineering is the venture’s CTO. While Gülin, an MS in engineering from Stanford Univesity and an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business, is the CEO. Gulin has diverse experience – in product management at Paypal and through her successful entrepreneurial ventures, CoachMe and Awardly.
Gülin firmly believes that for a product to be successful, it should be validated by the end users. It was but natural that she discussed OpsViz’s initial product idea with hundreds of potential customers before launching it. These discussions led to the discovery of a larger need for automation in data infrastructure management.
Mid-size companies were saddled with not just the problem of inefficient opensource DevOps tools but also inefficient processes to monitor data management operations. On the other hand, traditional comprehensive enterprise solutions were quite expensive and disruptive to the client environment.
The Solution
OpsViz therefore focused on developing affordable solutions for these challenges. With its flexible back-end and connectors to commonly used open-source tools, OpsViz ‘snaps in’ the architecture of its customers to ‘collect and clean’ the infrastructure data and analyze it.
By providing SaaS information management, OpsViz serves as a Single Source of Truth (SSOT) for customer systems. By enabling automation of cumbersome and routine tasks, OpsViz can eliminate unnecessary time and energy spent by IT operations teams of mid-sized businesses. It also helps IT teams analyze historical data and determine patterns to eliminate outages.
OpsViz also provides a robust and usable mobile platform that enables system admin and operations managers to have an accurate picture of the data infrastructure systems at any time and from any place.
The initial focus for OpsViz is the underserved mid-market companies that typically have 100-5,000 physical servers. As a result of the validation of the product and business by the end user segment, OpsViz can draw upon a confident customer base. Since their launch in early 2013, OpsViz has one paying customer, Wikia. Ten other companies have expressed interest in becoming beta customers. It is also in early negotiations with a Fortune 100 company.
OpsViz’s next plans to scale up by integrating with successful open-source tools such as Puppet and Chef and differentiate with its superior user experience. It positions itself against monitoring tools like Nagios by providing complete and accurate information.
OpsViz is set to bootstrap till it reaches the $1 million revenue mark. It currently reaches out to potential customers through direct sales using tools like Alexa rankings, LinkedIn, and data.com. The company has recently hired an engineer and also works with some part-time UX experts.
OpsViz plans to enter the enterprise market once it has gained a strong foothold in the mid-market. It intends to differentiate itself by providing an affordable and extensible platform for smart data center operations. Its long-term vision is to provide collective intelligence and best practices on infrastructure management by applying data analytics to infrastructure operations.
Aira Bongco
It’s amazing how bright minds can come up with ideas when there is a desperate need for it. This means that as more people need it, there is a desperate need. And as long as the market has the money to spend, then you can expect to make some good money out of it.