More than an Acquisition – A New Era in Cloud-Native Performance

Today we announced that we’ve acquired StormForger GmbH, a leading provider of SaaS-based application performance testing. We’ve also rebranded the newly combined organization as ‘StormForge’.

Across both teams, there’s all the excitement one would expect when two companies join forces. We’ve created a new entity with the momentum that’ll drive our next phases of growth, which is great for our employees, but also for our customers and partners.

But there’s much more excitement here than just the expected acquisition buzz, and here’s why: we truly believe that through this acquisition, we will be helping usher in a new era of proactive performance management for cloud-native applications.

How? We’ll do it by providing a fundamentally different way to manage application performance and availability in distributed environments that is far superior to the way it’s largely being handled today. 

As anyone who’s responsible for developing or managing applications in a distributed environment knows, finding, diagnosing, and fixing application problems is more difficult than ever. Resources are spun up and down so fast that teams using legacy tools and approaches don’t stand a chance. They are constantly in reactive mode, often operating with little more than guesswork.

It is precisely this uncertainty, the “not knowing why,” that introduces risk – to the customer experience, your reputation, financial margins, and ultimately to your business’s digital transformation initiative.    

The newly integrated StormForge Platform is changing that paradigm. Our vision is to make proactive performance and availability management of cloud-native applications not only possible but easy to achieve. 

Today’s acquisition is a giant step forward toward that goal. By combining SaaS-based load and performance testing with machine learning-driven, automated optimization in a unified platform, we’re well on our way to achieving our vision. We’re changing cloud-native application performance and reliability management from a reactive, inefficient fire drill into a proactive, automatic, and continuous process.

Emerging from this acquisition, StormForge has two key elements that enterprises need to safely and successfully make their leap to next-generation IT operations. First, we’ll give them the ability to understand, predict, and prepare for how cloud apps will behave under varying conditions and scale. Second, using machine learning, we can intelligently and automatically use insights from performance testing data to optimize their applications’ performance according to their desired result – fastest, lowest cost, most reliable, etc.

What that means is optimized application performance that continually learns and gets incrementally better with little to no human intervention.

Goodbye complexity. See you later, overprovisioning. Sayonara, guesswork, and manual resource management. Hello innovation, business agility, and cost efficiency.

The new era I see opening up immediately in front of us is one where the incredible power of cloud architectures and containerized apps can be harnessed more thoroughly and effectively by more teams in more organizations.

Instead of “embarking on digital transformation journeys,” we see organizations actually completing that leap successfully…and forging ahead from there with StormForge. That’s way more exciting than an acquisition and a new brand – it’s helping to change and improve the way IT supports business. It’s making a real difference, which is what all of us here at StormForge are determined to achieve.

Onward!  

Matt Provo
Founder and CEO, StormForge