Lanamark leaves the stealth mode and enters the capacity planning market

Today a new virtualization startup enters the market: Lanamark.

The company was founded in 2007 by Mark Angelo, is currently based in Canada and has less than ten employes.
Hard to believe Lanamark is one of the few startups that isn’t funded (yet) by a venture capital firm or an angel investor.

Angelo is a well-known figure in the virtualization industry coming from PlateSpin, where he was Product Line Manager for PowerRecon, and recently from VMLogix, where he was Director of Business Development.

Lanamark enters the capacity planning market, one of the most important segments recognized by virtualization.info in our Virtualization Industry Challenges report, where its CEO accumulated a lot of experience working on PowerRecon.

The capacity planning segment is populated by few but strong competitors which are already present on the scene since a while: Novell (through the acquisition of PlateSpin), CiRBA, VMware and Microsoft.
Despite that Lanamark may not have to compete with most of them.

The company in fact doesn’t plan to directly sell its platform to customers, but rather aims at offering it only to OEMs and service providers.

To create a valuable proposition Lanamark developed a three-tiers architecture ideal for those scenarios where the capacity planning is performed by a 3rd party entity:

  • the first component, Explorer, gets installed on a single machine in the customer network. From there it can discover all the physical assets on the site without any additional agent
  • the second component, Portal (which is hosted by Lanamark itself), stores the data collected by the Explorer and manages the customers analysis
  • the last component, Studio (which is managed by the system integrator), accesses the customer’s data available at the Portal and performs the actual capacity planning

This approach, similar to the one used by VMware with its Capacity Planner, avoids the consultants to waste time at customer’s site, performing the analysis and planning in house.
Obviously it may raise some concerns: the customer has to trust the whole platform when sending out its own precious data about company workloads and performance.
Lanamark will have to demonstrate that the transaction between all the components is secure enough, and that the Portal has acceptable data retain policies.

The company has another problem: VMware will allow its partners to use Capacity Planner for free within the end of this month, and Microsoft is working to offer its own capacity planning tool for free as well.
To win the competition Lanamark may bet on cross-platform capabilities: the platform will be able to perform capacity planning for multiple hypervisors, obviously including VMware, Citrix and Microsoft ones.

The product will be available soon through an early adoption program.
The 1.0 release instead is expected in Q3 2008.

Lanamark has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.
The Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.