Real-Time App Monitoring Becomes Easier with Boundary

According to a ResearchandMarkets report, the global application performance management market size is projected to grow from $2.72 billion in 2014 to $ 4.98 billion by 2019. That translates to an annual growth rate of 12.9%. Mountain View-based Boundary is among the leading vendors in this industry.

Boundary’s Offerings

Boundary was founded in 2010 by Benjamin Black and Cliff Moon. Prior to setting up Boundary, Cliff was a lead engineer at Powerset, a natural language search engine. He was responsible for the design, implementation, launch, and operation of Powerset’s core products. Powerset was acquired by Microsoft.

Boundary, though doesn’t have much to do with search engines. It is an application performance monitoring platform that sits on every VM, collects and consolidated performance data, and interprets the data in an understandable context using its real-time application map. The platform does not require any change to the application and is able to operate on applications irrespective of their language and infrastructure.

They operate on the SaaS model, thus reducing cost of ownership as organizations are not required to procure and manage hardware or software upgrades. Their open architecture helps organizations leverage their extensive library of adapters to build custom adapters quickly. Additionally, they offer real-time views that show unique, per-second application chatter and operations analytics. The platform is thus able to immediately alert developers on changes and code updates as they happen, and track the impact of these changes. Finally, since the system allows for tracking of historical data, developers can go back in time to analyze event data for as long as a year and improve app performance.

Boundary has integrated their service with the Amazon Web Service cloud. Users do not have to install any additional software or go through any configurations as the work is all done within AWS CloudWatch. AWS CloudWatch metrics are well integrated with Boundary so that customers are able to view all vital application monitoring data through an easy-to-use dashboard.

Boundary’s Financials

Boundary operates on a freemium model. Customers can choose to opt for their basic free option, which comes with features such as 1 second metric resolution, unlimited alerting, 8-server metrics, 24-hour data retention, and access to community support. Pricing options start at $8 per server per month and offer an unlimited AWS Cloudwatch capability along with higher number of server support and a 30-day-date retention capability. The advanced option is priced at $12 per month per server and offers access to unlimited server metrics, support for unlimited servers, unlimited app monitoring, and custom metric design capabilities.

Boundary does not disclose any of their financials. As of 2014, they had over 120 customers and were handling over 15 terabytes of data, translating to 2 trillion records per day. According to their management, a typical client was spending between $30,000-$150,000 a year for Boundary’s monitoring technology. While that is a wide range, it translates to revenues of $3.6 million-$18 million of revenues per year for 2014. Their customers include names like Scripps Networks Interactive, Salesforce.com, The Weather Channel, Zendesk, Gilt, Expedia, Websense, HCL Technologies, and Rackspace.

Their competitors include other Billion Dollar Unicorns including New Relic and App Dynamics. New Relic had listed last year and is currently trading at a market capitalization of $1.5 billion with revenues of $33.4 million and a loss of $0.22 per share for the last reported quarter. AppDynamics has also been evaluating an IPO and was trending at annual revenues of more than $100 million in 2014. The app monitoring market place is heating up with bigger vendors like Microsoft entering the market.

Boundary is also gearing up for this competition by improving their product offerings. Earlier this month, they announced the launch of Boundary CLI, a non-graphical Command Line Interface (CLI) that improves the ease of use and flexibility of the Boundary APIs. The CLI can be used to script batch operations or perform some common functions without requiring the developer to manually create them.

Boundary is venture funded so far with $41.1 million in funding from investors including Scale Venture Partners, Adams Street Partners, Triangle Peak Partners, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Their last round of funding was held in April 2014 when they raised $22 million at an undisclosed valuation.