1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2013: OpsViz, Palo Alto, California

OpsViz provides infrastructure source of truth as a service for technology companies. With its flexible back-end and connectors to commonly used open-source tools, OpsViz ‘snaps in’ the architecture of its customers to ‘collect and clean’ the infrastructure data and analyze it. What sets OpsViz apart is that its founder Gülin Yilmaz managed to validate the business and pricing models and has a confident customer base to draw upon.

OpsViz was founded in 2012 by CEO Gülin Yilmaz and CTO Kenneth Jiang. An industrial engineer and an MBA from Stanford University, Gülin has diverse experience – in product management at Paypal and through her successful entrepreneurial ventures, CoachMe and Awardly.

Kenneth, on the other hand, has 15 years of back-end systems engineering and 2 years as the DevOps manager at PayPal. It was his cumbersome experience in using open-source and free tools at Paypal that led them both to begin a venture in the DevOps space.

But when they discussed their product idea with hundreds of potential customers, they discovered a demand for automation products for data infrastructure management. So the original DevOps product idea was tweaked and OpsViz was created to design solutions catering to this demand. Since their launch in early 2013, OpsViz has one paying customer, Wikia. Ten other companies have expressed interest in becoming beta customers. It is also in early negotiations with a Fortune 100 company.

OpsViz currently reaches out to potential customers through direct sales using tools like Alexa rankings, LinkedIn, and data.com. The company has recently hired an engineer and also works with some part-time UX experts. It is hopeful of raising a seed round of funding this year.

The main value proposition for OpsViz is that it helps the IT operations teams of mid-size companies streamline and automate their data center operations. Its SaaS information management serves as a Single Source of Truth (SSOT) for customer systems. It enables automation and analysis of historical data that helps to determine patterns to eliminate outages. Their tablet app for data infrastructure management, which allows easy and mobile access to information, has received enthusiastic response from customers and has become the cornerstone of their differentiation strategy. Their vision is to provide collective intelligence and best practices on infrastructure management by applying data analytics to infrastructure operations.

The main competitors for OpsViz in the small to mid market are the open-source/homegrown tools. Competition is also growing in the space with the emergence of new startups like OpsMatic, VictorOps etc. OpsViz’s initial go-to-market strategy is to integrate with open-source and free tools and differentiate with its mobile platform and superior user experience. It positions itself against monitoring tools like Nagios by providing complete and accurate information.

The initial focus for OpsViz is the underserved mid-market companies that have 100-5000 physical servers and the price is $100 per node annually. According to its research, there are about 5,000 US companies that use 2,000 physical servers and 15,000 that use 500 servers. Assuming that 25% are virtualized, the total addressable market (TAM) in the US would be $3.25 billion. Assuming that the US market is half the global market size, TAM global would be about $6.5 billion.

In the future, OpsViz plans to enter the enterprise market once it has gained a strong foothold in the mid-market. It would differentiate itself by providing an affordable and extensible platform for smart data center operations. Its research shows that there are about 500 companies globally in the enterprise segment with 10,000 physical servers. At the lower price point of $50, the global enterprise market size would be $2.5 billion.

Regarding exit, Gülin says, “We think that we can become a very large company in 3-5 years. We would like to IPO and would love to see OpsViz empower operations teams around the world.”

This segment is a part in the series : 1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2013