Boundary Prepares SaaS-based Network Monitoring Service

Boundary, a startup, in December will launch a public beta test of its SaaS-based network monitoring service. Boundary, launched by a former Amazon Web Services executive, expects the SaaS service to reach its commercial release in Q1 2012, according to VP of Marketing Bob Quillin. Here’s the strategy.

Boundary’s founders have a long-standing background in focusing on network security, operations, data center design and infrastructure operations. Co-founder and CEO Ben Black previously worked on network infrastructure and security solutions for Amazon. Now the company is leveraging Black’s background, along with the similar experience of Architect and Co-founder Cliff Moon, to try to deliver the most comprehensive, real-time traffic and monitoring solution on the market.

“We have a clear vision of how to move the operations side forward around monitoring public and private cloud environments,” Quillin said. “We’ve built a high-performance SaaS platform to monitor traffic flow in Amazon EC2 and public and private clouds, in real-time.”

We hear the claim of “real-time” monitoring from pretty much every network monitoring provider on the market. So what makes Boundary different from potential rivals? “Customers usually turn to open source tools because traditional tools from traditional vendors aren’t designed for the cloud,” Quillin said. “Open source is okay at the beginning, but when you scale up to real-time you need speed, volume and accuracy to solve issues. This is an opportunity to become much more operationally focused.”

Quillin claims that Boundary captures all company data and gives users access to information that they never had before. Here’s how it works: You slip the Boundary meter into your server. Boundary picks up all of your traffic in real-time. Then the Boundary platform uses dashboards to present the information according to application types, server types, and deviations from normal activity. Users can choose whether to capture all data or select data. The more data you allow Boundary to capture, the more correlation the platform is able to perform.

“It’s simple to use, it can be up and running in five minutes and security transmits information in the SaaS platform,” Quillin continued. “You can have your information in real-time. Plus the public cloud visibility we provide lets you see traffic and activity, and we give alerts when we find irregularities that may indicate a security issue.”

Boundary has a few companies currently using the platform in private beta right now. Boundary plans to scale up its number of public beta users from December up until its general release to a few hundred users. Pricing hasn’t been nailed down yet. We’ll bring you more info as soon we get it.