BM: ToutVirtual was incorporated in January 2005. The work began around that time and we started with just the three of us; Vipul Pabari, Jess Marinez and myself. We, at that time, looked at the market for possible opportunities targeting enterprise customers and we found a niche in Systems and Security Management for virtualization infrastructures. We believe that there is a need for an integrated system that would allow our customers to manage virtualization technologies, as they start deploying virtualization in production and data centers the management complexities increase drastically. A whole new set of management issues arrive specific to virtualization. After talking this over with our customers, we decided to come out with what we now call our VirtualIQ Product Suite to manage Systems and Security for Virtual infrastructures.

There are four products within the VirtualIQ Suite: AssetIQ, ProvisionIQ, RouterIQ, and ShieldIQ. AssetIQ, is an Asset Manager for global visibility. ProvisionIQ for pre-provisioning, provisioning and decommissioning of virtual images and for creating an automated workflow that we believe is quite unique. The third product is RouterIQ for balancing applications and workload management. And, the fourth product is ShieldIQ for protection and optimization.

We focused on visibility, orchestration, optimization and protection as the four key components of the VirtualIQ Suite. Now, within the ShieldIQ, we created a ShieldIQ Standard Edition, which is a free monitoring product that was announced last week. ShieldIQ Client and Server Edition, to provide a lot more control and automation of hosted virtual applications. So this is a very quick overview of how we got started and a little bit about our VirtualIQ product suite.

BM: ShieldIQ Standard Edition is available for public beta; it’s a free monitoring product. The complete ShieldIQ Client and Server Edition will generally be available at the end of March.

VP: Yes - We will support that down the road, but the initial release is going to focus on the Windows platform.

VP: Well, ShieldIQ is going to be targeted mainly at Hosted Virtualization platforms, while the VirtualIQ suite supports ESX as well as Hosted Platforms.

VP: Yes, they are all available at the moment. We are slowly going to be releasing them for public beta. They are all running in closed betas at the moment. They are all coming down the pipe. We are slowly turning on the tap.

VP: Yes. We have a number of customers that have decided (to use it) in the test environment, but they have decided to use it in the production environment as well now. And, part of the key things, as Bakul mentioned, is when you look at the market there are a lot of companies out there providing a tool in one silo or another, whereas what we are trying to provide is a complete set of tools that people are going to need to manage their virtual infrastructure.

VP: Yes, right. We have a broad range of products in our portfolio, solutions from many companies will look like they overlap with our offerings. We are trying to provide a single vendor solution to address new challenges faced by enterprises in managing their virtual infrastructure.

VP: Part of the thing is, I don’t know an exact feature-by-feature comparison, but part of it is where we all come from, what our backgrounds have been. We’ve built management tools for the industry for a long time. Bakul, Jess and I all have IT management backgrounds and have built solutions for Fortune 1000 before, so we know what kind of solutions IT needs. Before we started writing the software, we spoke with our very large VMware customers, who own pretty much everything that is available and we asked them what are the problems and challenges that need to be addressed, because virtualization brings new challenges. That was really our driving factor in developing our solutions. So, we don’t look at who else is doing what. We kind of looked at, these are our customers, these are problems they have outlined and how can we provide solutions for that?

VP: Yes. Our strategy is to provide one tool, one user interface, in the enterprise class to manage any underlying virtual infrastructure. Today, VMware is the leader, so that’s what our solutions are targeted at. But, Microsoft is pushing their virtual technology platform, and there is also Xen in the equation. Not before long, Intel and AMD will have support of virtualization capabilities across all of their chipsets and will be available on all new computers. So, rather than IT people learning different tools to manage different virtual infrastructures, we are trying to provide one management tool for virtualization and we will handle all the interaction behind the scenes.

VP: Right. We were at VM World last year and that’s when we kind of just announced what we have available and we had a very great turnout and interest in our solutions and everybody who stopped by our booth said, “Yes, I know what you are talking about. This is definitely a problem that needs to be addressed.” And, that is basically what we are trying to do. We are trying to basically focus on the virtual infrastructure layer and provide the solution, which addresses those problems. There are other vendors, the traditional management vendors, that will be providing solutions but we are trying to expand from the physical world and the concept of the physical world, into a virtual world, whereas the problems are not the same. So, that’s why we decided to provide a complete solution, which is specifically targeted to addressing virtualization needs.

VP: Yes. We are in discussions with many partners.

VP: Thank you.