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July 21, 2008
Credit Suisse Lineage Makes DynamicOps a Contender
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The virtualization management market is hot, no one is denying that. But as with most things in life, great theories don't always pan out in practice; technologies can seem flawless in the lab only to fizzle when put to the test in real datacenters. However, this isn't necessarily the result of any ineptitude on the part of the development team. Rather, it is merely the result of the developers not having years of experience dealing with the hodgepodge and complexity that is the real world of enterprise computing.
This real-world experience is the very thing that could make Credit Suisse spin-off DynamicOps, with its Virtual Resource Manager (VRM) product, a virtualization management powerhouse. It's difficult to replicate in the lab the conditions and concerns of an international banking goliath.
The Catalyst: Virtualization
It all began in 2002, when Credit Suisse product development head Leslie Muller, now DynamicOps CTO, saw VMware explode onto the scene, signaling x86 virtualization's rise to prominence as the enabling technology for the next-generation datacenter. But it wasn't all roses for Muller, who “has a sense of déjà vu when that happened, thinking back to around the time when [Windows] NT 3.51 really made a splash in the market.” NT 3.51 was a great product, notes Muller, but the management piece was “a nightmare.” He saw the same fate awaiting virtualization.
The management concerns, however, weren't nearly enough to squelch Muller's optimism, as he foresaw virtualization being far too valuable to Credit Suisse to ignore it – especially in terms of time-to-market. In the old-guard way of doing things, businesses would develop new opportunities and want to execute within a couple of weeks, only to spend between three and six months waiting for a physical server to be requisitioned and ready to use. Alternatively, Muller saw businesses buying premium servers in bulk up front, only to find them obsolete by the time they needed to roll them out. Virtualization, on the other hand, would enable easy service delivery and truly flexible businesses. Like in the real world of ATMs and online shopping, all anyone wanted was self service, said Muller.
By the time Muller gave the entire cast of IT decision-makers at Credit Suisse a “shoot for the moon” speech about virtualization in 2005, his team already has been building prototypes and working, albeit quite unsuccessfully, with other virtualization and IT solutions providers to try and solve some of Credit Suisse's most pressing issues. Muller's team was laying out use cases and problems, asking companies like VMware, Microsoft and HP, among others, what technologies they had to address these issues. “To be honest,” he stated, “the answers we got were really unsatisfactory.” And even if they understood the technological aspects, they didn't understand the complexity involved in deploying virtualization across such a large company. So Credit Suisse took on the task of building VRM.
Having proved its value in short order, VRM received more internal funding and evolved into version 2.0 by mid-2007, at which time Credit Suisse took a look around the marketplace to see if there were any available solutions that could compete on the scale it needed. There were not.
Thus, partially as a result of clamoring from financial services competitors who knew of VRM and saw how it enabled Credit Suisse to out-compete them by moving quickly without having to buy and provision hardware, the company decided to sell VRM. The only way to do this correctly and ensure adequate resources for further development was to spin-off the company, seeking external funding and the whole nine yards. The result: DynamicOps -- Credit Suisse's first technology spin-off. (But, according to Muller, not its last.)
Operational Expenditure or Operational Experience?
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