Deal Radar 2009: Nimsoft

Founded in 2002, Nimsoft is a leading provider of service level management (SLM). It develops and sells software to monitor and manage IT systems. In October 2009, the Redwood City, California-based company extended its reach with Unified Monitoring, solutions for virtualized datacenters, hosted and managed services, cloud platforms, and SaaS resources.

The solutions help enterprise customers to define and measure the actual costs of cloud computing and monitor the performance of their IT infrastructure. The Nimsoft Monitoring Solution™ (NMS) is expected to reduce an enterprise’s total cost of ownership by up to 80% compared to legacy systems management vendors, while scaling and extending in ways that are not possible for these systems. Nimsoft’s service monitors the performance and availability of the likes of Google Apps for Business, Rackspace Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and EC2, Salesforce, and other similar services. Further, it allows users to create their own performance and capacity planning reports. The reports can help in making decisions on where to redistribute workloads, to benchmark performance metrics, and to monitor SLAs. Further, the system’s architecture does not warrant the deployment of a new monitoring solution for outsourced services, public or private clouds, or SaaS implementations.

Nimsoft competes with IBM, HP, CA and BMC and likes to refer to them as “old generation.” In an article in Techworld, Mark Rivington, vice president for technical services at Nimsoft, said that while its competitors base their business around supplying professional services, Nimsoft concentrates on software. Only 5% of its business is centered on professional services. Further, since Nimsoft is inexpensive compared to its competitors, the company can target large, budget-conscious corporations.

The company has 780 customers in 36 countries, which include mid-market and global organizations, such as Barclays Capital and Amway Corporation, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ladbrokes, MTU Aero Engines, TriNet, TRW Automotive, and leading managed service providers such as CDW Berbee, Easynet, and Rackspace Managed Hosting.

According to Inc.com, the company’s revenue increased from $12.4 million in 2005 to $41.5 million in 2008 and its growth rate stood at 235.3%. In October, the company announced its Q3 results. Its monthly recurring revenue was up over 60% from the prior year and new bookings more than doubled, up over 120%. Further, during Q3, nearly 80% of the company’s new bookings were generated from recurring revenue contracts. Compared to the previous year, the company’s order backlog (contractually committed orders that have not yet been shown as revenue) was up by over 70% to nearly $40 million. Nimsoft has been cash flow positive for every quarter in 2009, and the company expects to continue to be cash flow positive for Q4 and the entire year.

The company has raised a total of $22.3 million so far: a $10.3 million Series A from JMI Equity and Northzone Ventures in January 2007; and a $12 million Series B from Goldman Sachs, JMI Equity, and Northzone Ventures in October 2008.

Suggested Reading:

*Deal Radar 2008: Zyrion
*Trend Radar 2008: SaaS in the Enterprise
*Business 2010

This segment is a part in the series : Deal Radar 2009