InovaWave has been one of the few companies in the exploding virtualization market that didn’t survive the early days.
Founded by the former CTO of Surgient, Dave McCrory, InovaWave tried to sell a performance enhancer for virtualization platform. For some unclear reasons the company decided to end its business and start from scratch with a new name in February 2008: Hyper9.
The new corporation keeps McCrory as CTO and Chris Ostertag as President and CEO.
Matrix Partners and Silverton Partners funded this second attempt to conquer the market with $7.2 million.
Surprisingly enough, the company not only has a new name but also a completely different focus: the cross-platform management market.
The new product, called Virtual Infrastructure Search and Analytics, will be released at VMworld 2008 but will only support VMware at its first release.
To convince VMware customers to drop their trusted VirtualCenter (or to use two management consoles at the same time), the company bets on a new interface built around a search engine which indexes all resources in the virtual data center and provides some easy to read analytics about them.
Hyper9 may show something interesting in this area, replicating the innovation brought by Splunk in the auditing world. But the need for such approach implies a massive amount of VMs to look at, and the number of such big implementations is very limited at today.
Additionally, Hyper9 will have to compete with a big number of cross-platform management solutions, which already offer support for at least two hypervisors.
We’ll see the company market strategy on September 15.