Bulletproof Networks moves up the stack

Sydney's Bulletproof Networks has announced it will bundle application and database monitoring free of charge as part of its managed hosting services in an attempt to further differentiate its services from commodity cloud computes.

The company launched VMware-based virtual server provision in 2006 and also uses commodity infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) from Amazon Web Services as part of its portfolio.

Bulletproof chief operating officer Lorenzo Modesto said the company grew at some 73 percent in fiscal 2011, versus an industry average of 20 percent.

The company is now looking to “climb higher up the food chain” by bundling services such as application and database management.

Modesto said that managed hosting “traditionally stops at the operating system.

“Everything to do with the application is usually the responsibility of the customer”, he said, the exception being those larger organisations outsourcing to systems integrators like IBM and Fujitsu.

Bulletproof will work with customers to create test scripts that monitor hosted applications and databases to ensure the web site isn’t just available but also functioning correctly.

“If we receive an alert, we can do proactive troubleshooting 24x7,” Modesto said. “We see if we can resolve the issue, and if we can’t we escalate it to the application or database owner and liaise with them to resolve the issue.

Modesto said monitoring is a far better alternative to “relying on customers to tell you if the web application or database isn’t doing what it should do.”

It also helps those organisations with many thousands of customers to help troubleshoot whether problems are widespread or isolated to a given customer, he said.