SolarWinds had two announcements today, growing them further out of their traditional network management area into more general IT Management. Here, they added in Application Performance Management (APM) with a new product along with virtualization and server management with the acquisition of fellow Austin-based Hyper9.

The area of APM can be a shifty one – monitoring end-to-end transactions and application workflows can be technically difficult as you move across tiers, collect together un-integrated data sources, and otherwise try to track what went wrong between the user’s mouse click and the web of infrastructure the application is spread over. Solarwind’s MO, thus far, has been to provide easy to access tools (downloadable and self-installable) at affordable rates. The tools aren’t free, but they’re low enough barrier to entry that many admins who, for example, use the free Spiceworks suite also use Solarwinds. You find Solarwinds tools paired up a lot like that. See this 2009 RedMonkTV video with Solarwinds Josh Stephens for a quick, if older, overview.

While discussing the APM release with them, Solarwinds noted that APM tools are typically expensive, and perhaps exotic to their customer base. Their hope, then, is to do what Solarwinds does best: commoditize tools just enough to get wider access, but not too much that there’s not enough good business in them for the company itself. In the IT Management space, that’s a welcome trend for most (compared to the development middleware space where barbs of not open sourcing and, thus, totally making free the application would be thrown about…in past years at least).

Speaking more broadly, adding in APM and buying Hyper9 gives Solarwinds the portfolio needed to start making the claim that it’s a general IT Management shop. While Hyper9 hasn’t been a break-away success (compared to, say, Splunk), their technology has always been interesting: their depth in understanding virtualized data centers, searching, and then reporting over that lump of IT has always seemed good when I’ve been walked through demos in the past. If Solarwinds can (even lightly) integrate together their strong base in network management, storage, APM, and now servers/virtualization, they’ll be a compelling portfolio at, no doubt, competitive price points. That portfolio gardening and integration is key: Solarwinds has always been a good bucket of tools and as the company ages, they have to keep their portfolio from becoming a big katamari ball of fun that you’re destined to roll around for eternity.

Disclousre: Splunk is a client, as is Spiceworks. Solarwinds has been a client in the past.

The Numbers fans among you might have noticed a short interruption in the weekly numbers roll-up while I was on vacation. Tragically, my numbers skills don’t extend into predictions. That said, here are a small sample of the more interesting numbers that pilled up while I was gone:

Chumby Gets More Cash

Chumby Industries has raised $3 million…. As I reported, Chumby previously raised a total of $20 million in VC funding.

I’ve had a Chumby for awhile now. While I don’t really do much with it – it stays powered off most of the time – it is a fascinating little device.

PHP on IIS

And the community is responding – we’ve had over 1.5 million downloads of our products through the [Web Platform Installer] since January of this year (!!) and almost 150,000 applications from the Windows Web Application Gallery downloaded since March 17th.

SolarWinds Finally IPOs

SolarWinds this week filed its initial public offering that would be worth $139 million and Wednesday more than 12 million of the network and systems management software maker’s shares will begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

Also, see Ashlee Vance’s brief write-up.

Virtualization at BMC

BMC is one of the largest VMware shops anywhere. We have nearly 9000 Virtual Machines running in our ESX server farms alone. Our growth trajectory will have us break 10,000 VM’s before the end of the summer. The is just VMware, which is not the only virtual player in our shop.

Not all that long ago, our worldwide “real” server count for R&D was a large number: well north of 10,000 real, physical computers. BMC grew, more products came online: entire product categories even… and the real hardware footprint has shrunk to about half what it was three years ago. Ditto the data center space. The current R&D DC move I am working on has us taking over 7000 jam packed square feet down to 5000 square feet… and leaving room to absorb another 1000 square foot lab later. In this one lab, we have leveraged virtualization to more than halve the number of real servers.

BMC is a software company, so their environment is geared towards developing, testing, and supporting software, where many of those boxes are probably involved. That said, in large companies, you could still expect similar types of numbers, sprawl, and whatnot.

Someone cut off The Long Tail

Of the 215,000 video channels on Kyte, nearly all are created by consumers, but only about 1,000 account for more than 90 percent of the mobile videos streamed via the service. And those 1,000 channels are invariably the work of professionals or the cell-phone videos of famous people such as musicians Lady Gaga and Soulja Boy.

The Android Hoard

In its latest report, the firm predicted that Android smartphone shipments will increase a whopping 900 per cent during 2009 over last year. Shipments of Apple’s iPhone will grow 79 per cent this year, SA said.

Over the past month, stories of companies using Android have been coming hot and heavy. There’ll be an interruption in news-buzz when the iPhone 3.0 OS comes out, but it’s starting to look like Android it getting more and more attention.

Disclosure: SolarWinds is a client, as is Microsoft.

While visiting with RedMonk client SolarWinds recently I recorded a super-short interview with Josh Stephens, SolarWinds “Head Geek.”

I asked him to go over SolarWinds portfolio of products, define exactly what “network management” is, and then show us a quick preview of their newly announced personal dashboard, Workspace Studio, an addition to the Engineer’s Toolkit.

Disclosure: SolarWinds is a client.