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7 Minutes With Virtual Instruments VP of Channels Paul Brodie

This week Virtual Instruments announced that version 5.4 of its VirtualWisdom infrastructure performance monitoring (IPM) and analytics suite will be available at the end of December, so we decided to check in with channel chief Paul Brodie to see where the company stands on its partner program.

Brodie joined Virtual Instruments from Brocade in September.

Virtual Instruments has its roots in managing storage and went through something of a bumpy ride in the past few years before merging last March with competitor Load DynamiX and acquiring virtualization performance monitoring company Xangati. It recently announced deals with Gigamon and Cisco to better analyze their NAS and SAN hardware, respectively.

The company says it’s focused on providing insights into virtualized, multivendor environments. Competitors — and integration opportunities, says Brodie — include APM providers such as AppDynamics, BMC, CA and New Relic as well as network performance monitoring specialists ExtraHop, NetScout and SolarWinds. Current alliance partners include AWS, Dell EMC, HPE, Microsoft and Red Hat.

Virtual Instruments’ Paul Brodie

Brodie calls out VirtualWisdom’s ability to show how applications relate to the underlying infrastructure, to balance performance and cost in light of an app’s criticality to the business, what the company calls “an application-centric point of view.” Analytics enable customer IT teams or MSPs to guarantee granular, performance-based SLAs and make sure the network is delivering.

The new release adds executive- and application-level dashboards; workload and capacity optimization from VM to storage array; improved diagnostics and baselining; and support for hyperconverged infrastructure including VX:Rails, Nutanix, Simplivity, vSAN, ScaleIO and Netflow.

Channel Partners: Tell us what customers love about your product or service. What’s the secret selling sauce?

Paul Brodie: Customers of Virtual Instruments are typically midsize to large enterprises that run mission-critical applications that can’t go down or slow down. They love the ability to assess and proactively manage the performance, utilization and health of their IT infrastructures from the context of the application. The VirtualWisdom App-centric Infrastructure Performance Monitoring (IPM) platform is the gold standard in the industry, deployed and proven at over 500 enterprise data centers and in over 50 of the Fortune 100. Knowing which infrastructure components are associated with each application helps them identify, troubleshoot and optimize the infrastructure at unprecedented speeds.

The secret to selling Virtual Instruments is finding customers who care deeply about application response times and like to eliminate the risks associated with application and infrastructure changes and upgrades. The VirtualWisdom real-time monitoring platform is vendor-agnostic and offers easy-to-understand analytics that provide real answers to IT managers, not just data. The machine-learning based analytics capabilities enable customers to assure application performance, optimize infrastructure resources and dramatically accelerate problem identification and resolution.

CP: Describe your channel program — metal levels, heavy on certifications, open or selective, unique features?

PB: The VIP (Virtual Instruments Partner) Program has…

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