The network monitoring and management services company Boundary said it has raised $22 million in its latest round of funding, as it looks to sell companies a new generation of tools to understand what’s happening in and around their networks.
The round was led by Adams Street Partners and included new investor Triangle Peak Partners as well as existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and Scale Venture Partners. To date, Boundary has raised $41 million since its launch in January 2011.
All of that cash comes on the heels of rising demand for new tools to manage far-flung networks. As more information technology infrastructure moves to the “cloud”, companies need to see what’s happening with applications throughout their systems, according to Boundary chief executive, Gary Read.
“As customers are moving environments or creating new environments in this sort of Web-scale IT world, they’re looking for the correct management tools to deploy, manage, monitor and secure those environments,” Read said. “They look at the monitoring space and they need to monitor the application code itself and they need to monitor the infrastructure.”
Using Boundary’s services clients have access to massive amounts of information about what’s happening as their own customers navigate through websites and applications.
“What the company set out to do was to break the boundaries of traditional monitoring,” according to Read. “Collecting more data, processing it faster, and creating up to date context on the data to help companies find more problems and solve more problems — the original concept was big data, big data analytics meets IT monitoring and IT management.”
The company already has 120 customers using its services and its software handles over 15 terabytes of data, or roughly 2 trillion records per day on their behalf. A typical client will pay between $30,000 and $150,000 per year for Boundary’s monitoring technology, Read said.
Boundary’s services come with that hefty price tag, because they address what Read said was a hefty problem. “Outages, when they happen today… they’re front page news,” said Read.
Some of the companies using Boundary’s service now include Scripps Networks Interactive, Salesforce.com, The Weather Channel, Zendesk, Gilt, Expedia, Websense, HCL Technologies, and Rackspace.
Information technology management is a huge business, with roughly $20 billion spent annually on tools to keep the lights on and things running smoothly, according to new Boundary investor Mike Zappert, a principal with Adams Street Partners.
“DevOps and IT Operations teams moving to new distributed and cloud architectures have been flying infrastructure blind and that’s exactly where Boundary comes in – to give them visibility into previously unseen issues,” said John Vrionis, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, in a statement.
Photo via Flickr user Claus Rebler