FiveRuns Announces General Availability of Web 2.0 Systems Management Solution

August 16, 2006; 03:54 AM

FiveRuns announced the general availability of its Systems Management offering, a hosted Web 2.0 application designed for progressive IT professionals. FiveRuns will demonstrate the software this week during the LinuxWorld Conference in San Francisco, booth #1822.

FiveRuns Systems Management delivers a simple and straightforward solution for monitoring, analyzing, reporting, and predicting. Users are able to quickly identify problems in their environment and take proactive steps to improve overall system performance. Two months after its beta launch, FiveRuns exceeded 1,500 beta subscribers, fueled by its simple, attractive user interface (UI) built on Ruby on Rails and Ajax.

"The tremendous response to our beta offering confirms that IT managers are tired of data overload and heavy, inefficient applications associated with systems management solutions," said FiveRuns CEO and founder Steven Smith. "They are ready for a new breed of systems management solution that provides relevant, actionable data presented in an appealing and logical user interface."

Sleek Interface Delivers Powerful Functionality

Systems management solutions typically overwhelm IT managers with 'death by data,' which combined with outdated interfaces create poor user experiences. To avoid this, FiveRuns started from scratch, collaborating with cutting-edge usability experts to create a drastically improved workflow, resulting in a highly improved user experience and logical flow of data.

FiveRuns also leverages Ruby on Rails and Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) technologies to create a rich user experience. The versatile framework of Ruby on Rails empowers FiveRuns to quickly react to customer requirements and market changes, reducing overall product development time for new features.

"FiveRuns is doing a marvelous job showing the world that a productive web-development environment matters to more than just the traditional Web 2.0 type operations," said David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails and partner in 37signals. "If Ruby on Rails can prove a good fit for systems management, it can prove a good fit for a lot of other stale environments."

Up and Running in No Time Flat

FiveRuns brings traditional and open source systems management together in one application. Users are quickly up and running, monitoring their own heterogeneous system environment in minutes. A no-touch, auto-updating client makes FiveRuns very simple to both install and maintain.

"FiveRuns has been great. With similar tools we've used in the past, the install was painful. But with FiveRuns -- download, install, and start collecting stats -- that's how easy it is," said Josh Owens, co-owner of Steelpixel. "FiveRuns is helping us get a handle on all our servers, giving us much better insight than we had previously. And, it is definitely one of the most useful Rails applications we have used."

Extending the high quality, low cost benefits of open source solutions, FiveRuns offers Systems Management at a fraction of the cost of traditional management software. Using Software as a Service (SaaS) based monitoring and a monthly per server fee also reduces total cost of ownership, as well as the time and resources needed for implementation.

"Systems management for SMBs is such a tough thing to get right. The tools have to go further than enterprise ones in terms of making complex things simple as SMB IT admins don't have the skill level of their enterprise counterparts," said Gary Chen, Yankee Group analyst, small and medium business strategies. "It needs to be easy to acquire and deploy. The Web 2.0/SaaS model is a great way to do that and also lends itself to being offered as a managed service. And on top of all that, it also obviously needs to be affordable."

FiveRuns Systems Management Offering

FiveRuns currently supports both traditional and open source systems, such as Linux, Microsoft Windows, Sun Solaris, Mac OS X, JBoss, Apache, Tomcat, and MySQL.

The hosted service fee is $60 per server, per month, regardless of the number of applications running. This straightforward pricing structure allows users to take advantage of additional functionality as soon as it becomes available.

About FiveRuns Corporation

FiveRuns has developed a new breed of systems management software -- a simple, straightforward, open-source answer for your monitoring, analyzing, reporting and predicting needs. Monitor and maintain your systems wherever you are and whenever you want with little more than a web browser and an internet connection. FiveRuns is a privately held company based in Austin, TX. For more information, please visit http://www.fiveruns.com/.