VMblog:  Can you give us the high-level rundown of your company's technology offerings?

SolarWinds:  We are a leading provider of powerful and affordable IT infrastructure management software. Our products give organizations worldwide, regardless of type, size, or IT infrastructure complexity, the power to monitor, manage, and secure the performance of their IT environments, whether on-premises, in the cloud, or in hybrid models.

We build products designed to manage the simplest to the most complex IT environments. Our products are both powerful and affordable and address well-understood problems in IT management. They're also built to be influential, extensible, and scalable enough to address the complex and evolving needs of organizations of all sizes.

Our focus on the technology professional and commitment to excellence in end-to-end hybrid IT performance management has established SolarWinds as a worldwide leader in network and systems management software.

VMblog:  Talking about your product solutions, can you give readers a few examples of how your offerings are unique?  What are your differentiators?

SolarWinds:  We strive to take complexity out of IT, regardless of how an organization manages its IT infrastructure, where it's physically located, or from where it's managed. We design products to deliver value quickly and empower technology professionals to do their jobs more effectively and efficiently.

IT pros need a vendor-agnostic solution designed to monitor across your IT infrastructure, whether it be on-premises, in the cloud, or a combination. SolarWinds infrastructure solutions help organizations assure the health and configuration of physical and virtual servers, containers, private cloud, storage, and network infrastructure across hybrid IT environments-all in a single view.

VMblog:  For those individuals attending the VMworld 2020 digital event, or those who have attended VMworld in the past, why should they be interested in your company and solutions?

SolarWinds:  SolarWinds® Virtualization Manager (VMAN) is designed to be an intuitive tool for virtualization monitoring, performance management, capacity planning, and optimization across VMware® vSphere®, Microsoft® Hyper-V®, and Nutanix AHV environments. VMAN is affordable and easy to download, deploy, and use.

With VMAN, you can reclaim virtual resources quickly with VM sprawl alerts and recommendations. VMAN can automatically find idle, stale, and zombie VMs and orphaned VMDKs to help you free up storage space and improve overall performance. VMAN can guide you in rightsizing your VMs to recapture CPU and memory resources for further savings.

Virtualization Manager works with other SolarWinds solutions to deliver dashboards for end-to-end visibility into application and infrastructure performance in addition to your virtualization resources.

VMblog:  What specifically does your company offer a VMware shop or VMware implementation?

SolarWinds:  SolarWinds Virtualization Manager monitors VMware vSphere, Nutanix AHV, and Microsoft Hyper-V environments, whether on-premises or in the cloud-with a single tool. VMAN can also deliver visibility into how your virtualization environment connects to application, server, and storage infrastructure for faster troubleshooting.

VMAN offers insight into the performance, capacity, configuration, and usage of your virtualized infrastructure, including hosts, VMs, clusters, containers, vSANs, and other datastores. VMAN is also designed to deliver predictive recommendations to address active or potential performance issues. These recommendations can be run immediately or scheduled to run later-or use batch execution for quicker problem resolution.

VMblog:  VMware will be covering things in their keynote, but what big changes do you see taking shape in the industry?

SolarWinds:  According to SolarWinds IT Trends 2020 research, organizations have moved away from chasing much-hyped emerging technologies to instead renewing their focus on core strategies like hybrid IT, cloud computing, and security-technologies with better, more practical use cases. While enterprises have invested in engineering teams over the last three years to evaluate and build prototypes, ultimately they discovered many of the buzzworthy technologies-from blockchain to artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (as defined by the hype)-haven't added real value or delivered significant business transformation. Hype dies in the light of experience.

Sixty percent (60%) of tech pros/teams/departments are spending more time managing apps and services rather than infrastructure and hardware. This represents a monumental shift in the strategic importance of applications to the modern business. This growth in the influence of cloud applications on IT and managed services will continue to rise.

Finally, tech pros' ability to justify technology investments and operations decisions to business leadership continues to be a significant barrier to success-and an opportunity. The SolarWinds IT Trends Report 2020 findings clearly outlined two key barriers, most notably that managing hybrid IT complexities are all too often exacerbated by flat budgets and shifting internal priorities, a fact only amplified as budgets constrict. Tech pros' best course of action is to become educators. They'll need to invest time in continuous education and regular communication with business leadership and demonstrate the tight correlation between IT success and business success.