Correlsense Teams With IT Services Provider OnX

Application performance and business transaction management provider Correlsense, based in Framingham, Mass., is broadening its market reach to the north. The company announced last week it has partnered with OnX, a Canadian provider of managed IT services including managed hosting, infrastructure services, application management, and professional services.

Under terms of the deal, OnX's Enterprise Solutions group will resell and support Correlsense's SharePath solution in Canada. SharePath is designed to help enterprises manage, analyze and audit IT systems performance and management initiatives. Founded in 2005, the privately-held Correlsense aims at providing solutions that focus on transactions and service levels. "It's all about transactions," says Correlsense's CEO Oren Elias, who co-founded the company with Lanir Shacham, the company's CTO. "Transactions drive the business." To ensure reliability and performance levels, companies need tools that can track individual transactions through multiple hops throughout the data center and then analyze and extract meaningful data about these transactions.

The Correlsense founders wanted to develop a solution that was easy-to-use and offered broad visibility, without compromising any network, system or application performance. Traditional approaches rely on modeling and discover, but Elias claims these types of tools are no longer relevant in today's highly distributed, multi-tiered environments which are starting to include virtualization and cloud computing. "Everything is constantly changing. If you are running a discovery process to understand your environment, that takes a week. In the meantime, your cloud and virtualized environment changes every minute." SharePath is what Correlsense refers to as a business transaction management platform comprised of collection agents and analytics applications. The collection agents are installed on system servers to collect a variety of application events and system indicators. This data is sent to a central repository, where software synthesizes and analyzes it and then presents it via analytics applications. "We are installed in-band so everything flows through us, through the agents. The instant something new is introduced into the system, it is reflected in our model of the application or infrastructure within five seconds," Elias says.

For one customer, a large international investment bank, SharePath helped the bank pinpoint code in a database that was affecting the performance of an online trading application. The problem was causing the application to hang for several minutes five or six times a day, and the bank had networking staff, systems administrators, and application developers all looking for the trouble.

Several months ago, Correlsense began offering a free version of its SharePath solution, which provides customers with a subset of the functionality. Going forward, Correlsense will be extending SharePath's coverage into new environments, particularly into virtualized environments. The company is also working to add more value around the data collected via the agents by offering additional analytics, views, and dashboards.