Coradiant
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Software |
| Predecessor | Networkshop |
| Founded | 1997 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada |
| Founder | Alistair Croll, Eric Packman, Jean-François Dumoulin |
| Defunct | 2011 |
| Fate | Acquired by BMC Software |
| Headquarters | Boston, Massachusetts , United States |
Area served | North America, Europe |
Key people | Mike Chuli (CEO from 2001), Cary Goldwax, Thanos Moschopoulos |
| Products | OutSmart, OutSight, TrueSight, TrueSight BI, TrueSight AIM |
Number of employees | Approximately 15 (early days) |
| Parent | BMC Software (from 2011) |
Coradiant was a U.S.-based software company that specialized in the management and troubleshooting of web applications. On April 28, 2011, it was acquired by BMC Software for $130 million in cash.
Networkshop
Founded in 1997 by Alistair Croll and Eric Packman in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Networkshop concentrated on creating highly available web infrastructure solutions. The company also contributed research on subjects such as load balancing and SSL performance. Jean-François Dumoulin joined as a co-founder, helping expand the team to approximately 15 members.
Networkshop pioneered a technique for virtualizing front-end web hosting environments, working alongside vendors of firewalls, load balancers, switches, and cryptography technologies. This shared infrastructure was implemented within a Montreal data center managed by UUNET, linking directly to clients’ servers housed in the same facility.
Coradiant founding
Towards the end of 1999, Cary Goldwax and Thanos Moschopoulos became part of the company and rebranded it as Coradiant, a name symbolizing collaborative excellence in maintaining highly reliable web infrastructure—"brilliant together."
Supported initially by seed capital from Brett Helm, Coradiant began raising funds in early 2000 to extend its shared infrastructure approach to additional cities. By late 2000, it secured a $20 million Series A funding round, which at that time represented the largest venture investment in Canadian history, closing in early 2001. That same year, the Canadian operations relocated to larger premises within Montreal’s Windsor Station building.
Out-Smart management service
Coradiant shifted its corporate headquarters from Montreal to Boston, Massachusetts, while retaining engineering and product development teams in Montreal. Its virtualized infrastructure platform known as "OutSmart" was deployed across various North American data centers operated by Colo.com, Internap, Sprint, among others. The company expanded its presence with offices established in San Francisco, New York City, and London. In mid-2001, Mike Chuli assumed the role of CEO.
OutSight monitoring service
Following the downturn caused by the dot-com bubble burst and the shrinking Application Service Provider industry, the financial viability of shared infrastructure diminished. Coradiant’s OutSmart offerings became confined to tenants located within specific data centers hosting their virtual infrastructure. To broaden market access, early in 2002 Coradiant introduced OutSight—a customer-facing management interface made available to clients outside these data centers.
OutSight provided comprehensive monitoring of web application performance through three distinct methods: passive HTTP connection observation capturing end-user experience; SNMP GET queries to infrastructure elements; and synthetic transaction testing. The product was marketed independently until early 2004 when Coradiant significantly downsized its workforce and withdrew from the application management sector.
Development of True Sight
Although OutSight achieved sales success, its dependency on Coradiant-hosted systems limited its attractiveness for enterprise clients and those with stringent security requirements. Consequently, in 2003 Coradiant redirected development efforts toward TrueSight—a standalone web performance measurement solution unveiled at Interop 2004 that received the Best Of Show accolade. Its successor model, TrueSight TS-1100, also earned Best Of Show honors in 2005.
Subsequently, Coradiant launched TrueSight BI, a data warehouse appliance designed to enable customers to perform detailed analyses of user performance metrics segmented by servers, users, and individual pages for enhanced insight.
Recent developments
Coradiant advanced its technology portfolio focused on assessing end-user experiences with web applications, enabling IT departments to quickly detect and address performance challenges.
A Forrester Research report from June 2007 recognized Coradiant as a frontrunner in the field of web application performance monitoring, emphasizing its effective solution for tracking end-user experience.
In 2008, Coradiant formed a strategic alliance with Akamai Technologies to evaluate user experience across Akamai’s application delivery network. That same year, the company introduced TrueSight AIM, a machine learning platform utilizing statistical techniques to identify irregularities in web traffic patterns.
The acquisition of Symphoniq Corporation in 2009 broadened Coradiant’s capabilities in monitoring end-user web transactions.
BMC Software purchased Coradiant Inc. in April 2011 for $130 million in cash.