SolarWinds announced the acquisition of Pingdom, a leading provider of website monitoring and performance management solutions.

The acquisition of Pingdom will allow SolarWinds to expand beyond its traditional on-premise IT Management stronghold to support the evolution of performance management from on-premise IT, to IT as a Service, and to IT in the Cloud.

In the rapidly emerging Cloud era, complex technologies and application architectures are creating new challenges in developing and managing the availability of business-critical application environments.

These applications – including the platforms (web, mobile, Cloud) on which they operate – have a level of interdependence and complexity not experienced before.

With the average user’s expectation that websites, mobile apps and SaaS-based applications will perform within 3-5 seconds, failure to meet this “requirement” risks abandonment.

If an app is slow, the user experience quickly becomes unacceptable, the business’ productivity comes to a screeching halt, and revenue can be lost. SLOW IS THE NEW DOWN.

“As the mantra for web and applications operations teams moves from ensuring the basic availability of IT infrastructure to delivering performance management for critical application capabilities to end-users, the need for comprehensive performance management products increases,” said Kevin Thompson, CEO and President, SolarWinds. “Based on the feedback we have received from more than 150,000 customers, we know that web applications are becoming ubiquitous and increasingly critical to their businesses. We, as a key partner in solving performance issues, need to move with them through this transition.”

“We share SolarWinds’ vision of the evolution and development of the Web, web application and mobile application environments in support of business-critical processes,” said Sam Nurmi, CEO, Pingdom. “Comprehensive web app monitoring enables those responsible for web environments to sort through and analyze the vast amount of data created by websites, mobile and web applications, and the technology and infrastructure on which they depend. Access to the right information, delivered in real time, is the difference between reacting to business and driving the business.”

Pingdom, a leader in the website monitoring and performance market, is dedicated to making the web faster and more reliable by creating easy to use tools and services for website and web application owners, regardless of who they are, where they are and their size.

Based on the strength of the Pingdom product, more than 500,000 users worldwide, including some of the biggest brands in the world, entrust their web performance to Pingdom.

The level of visibility SolarWinds and Pingdom together can provide through their product offerings enables web and application operations teams by proactively identifying and addressing problems before they affect the end-user.

Thompson summarized, “Our approach to solving performance management for on-premise IT will extend to how we approach web application management and, eventually, Cloud management. We will continue to give users the ability to solve a specific management problem or use a combination of integrated products to get a top to bottom view of the application environment and the supporting infrastructure, regardless of where it lives. Based on Pingdom’s transactional business model and commitment to product usability, we believe that it is the right partner for SolarWinds as we extend our leadership in solving these emerging performance management issues.”