Fortisphere changes product and direction: from Virtual Insight to Virtual Service Management

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Fortisphere is a US startup that launched in November 2007 with a $10M capital provided by venture firms Fairhaven Capital and Globespan Capital Partners.

The company positioned itself as a player in the almost empty VM lifecycle management market segment with the product Virtual Insight 1.0, that was released in January 2008.

In the subsequent months the company has been extremely active in forming alliances, like the one with VMware about VMsafe or the one with RSA, and joining strategic groups, like the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) and the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Vendor Alliance.
In terms of product development, it didn’t show a significant progress, changing the product name from Virtual Insight to Virtual Essentials Service Manager in September 2008.

This August Fortisphere replaced its original CEO Michael Harper with Siki Giunta, and started to wipe out everything of the past, including most previous press announcements.
Giunta come from Novell, where she was the Vice President of Strategic Business for 9 months, and from Managed Objects where she was President and CEO for 9 years.

The biggest change emerges today: Fortisphere changes again the product name (the word Essentials disappeared), restarts from version 1.0 and changes market segment.
The “new” Virtual Service Manager (VSM) is now primarily focused on capacity planning (perfect timing considering that VMware just released CapacityIQ 1.0).

The configuration management engine (heart of most VM lifecycle management products) is still there as far at it seems from the features listed in the press announcement, but Fortisphere is now clearly going elsewhere.
We’ll see if the company will have better lack in the increasingly crowded capacity planning space.