I’m a sucker for history.
Specifically, I love companies that have a sense of history and pedigree behind them. Maybe its because my own business, Cactus Equipment, has for 25 years created products in a world which is awash with manufactured brands and pseudo-authenticity. Similarly, Corvil strikes me as a company in the technology space with a real history. The company was founded back in 2000 by John Lewis, the late Welsh mathematical physicist known for his contributions to areas including quantum measurement, Bose–Einstein condensation and large deviations theory.
Corvil was a commercial focus of Lewis’ own scientific approach. He believed the application of a mathematically rigorous approach was essential to understanding complex physical phenomena and he argued that a deep understanding of the underlying mathematical structure provided new physical insight. He instilled this approach into Corvil, his company that has been, over the past almost two decades, focused on the measurement and performance of internet traffic.
But Lewis understood one important thing: that neither time nor technology stand still, and since his death only a few years after the founding of Corvil, the company has continued to grow and innovate. Today Corvil is a well known solution provider that helps its customers derive IT, security, and business intelligence from network data. The Corvil streaming analytics platform captures, decodes and learns from network data on the fly, transforming it into machine-time intelligence for network, IT, security and business teams to operate more efficiently and securely in this new machine world.
Corvil has a big business in the financial sector and those customers are leveraging its platform across the globe, resulting in 354 trillion messages with a daily transaction value in excess of $1 trillion. And as the financial services industry (alongside most other industries) becomes more comfortable with the world of cloud, Corvil is making changes to suit -- today it is announcing Corvil Sensor, an offering aimed to extend packet-level visibility and network and security analytics to public, private and hybrid cloud architectures.
The rationale here is that organizations are increasingly keen to extend the benefits of the cloud to their IT infrastructures. Yet they are concerned about losing visibility from both a performance and security perspective when migrating highly regulated or business critical applications to public, private or hybrid cloud architectures. Which is where Corvil Sensor comes in with its promise to extend the same level of visibility that organizations get today, to more “cloudy” situations.
Corvil is pointing to some early beta customers who saw good outcomes from their initial usage of Sensor. Some examples include:
- A global bank eliminated the need for physical appliance deployment in their private cloud infrastructure -- reducing application deployment time from weeks to minutes.
- A large U.S. bank eliminated four days of troubleshooting time spent obtaining packets from their cloud infrastructure provider.
- A SaaS company protected workload migration from on-premise to public cloud infrastructure by using packet-based monitoring to eliminate security blind-spots.
MyPOV
What’s not to like? As more and more organizations move to a hybrid approach towards their infrastructure -- solutions that deliver a “single pane of glass” across public and private, as well as more traditional, infrastructures become more useful. It’s more efficient, easier, and more economical to boot. The ability to gather the same level of visibility -- both prior to and after migration of workloads, is a real boon for those toying with a more flexible approach towards application location.
Of course Corvil isn’t alone here; there are others offering a similar value proposition -- Thousand Eyes, Science Logic and Riverbed for example -- but competition is a good thing and will make Corvil strive to deliver on its founder’s vision of perpetually striving, exploring and engaging.
The company has a real history behind it, and with this release, Corvil is ensuring it has a similar future in front of it.