By Vishwanath Venugopalan
The 451Group
October 27, 2008

Support end-of-life events are usually major inflection points for large enterprises that trigger significant amounts of activity in their software development and IT operations teams. Austin, Texas-based Phurnace is well-positioned to gain a good amount of business from the resulting uncertainty.

• In July enterprise Java application management vendor Phurnace raised an additional $3.5m of series A funding, which brings its total funding to $5m to date.
• IBM has ended support for WebSphere Application Server (WAS) v5.1; the migrations that will surely result present a sizeable customer opportunity for Phurnace.
• The startup plans to expand its configuration and deployment chops beyond Web application servers into portals and other packaged applications as well as infrastructural pieces.

The 451 take

Support end-of-life events are usually major inflection points for large enterprises that trigger significant amounts of activity in their software development and IT operations teams. Austin, Texas-based Phurnace is well-positioned to gain a good amount of business from the resulting uncertainty. Configuration management of Web application servers is a tiny niche, though, and we're glad Phurnace has plans to expand beyond it to applications and infrastructure. The company must navigate database migration carefully because that is a different problem domain with a subtly distinct user base. Integrations with provisioning automation products will also be important to Phurnace's future.

Details

Phurnace Software automates the configuration and deployment of Java EE Web applications to application servers and assists with migrating applications among servers. The startup's latest round of funding was led by S3 Ventures. Previous investors, including DFJ Mercury, also participated. S3 managing director Brian Smith is now on the company's board. The money will be used to build a direct sales team and an executive team with relevant experience. Phurnace has about 20 customers, including IBM, American Airlines and Scholastic Publishing.

Even as IBM ends support for WAS v5.1, it plans to release WAS v7.0 by year-end. Phurnace expects to see sizeable business from migrations to the intervening WAS v6.X, even if some customers consider migrating directly to WAS v7.0. Phurnace now supports configuring and deploying WebSphere Portal 6.1 artifacts such as themes, skins and applications; support for other portals and enterprise applications, including content management systems, is imminent. Product plans in 2009 include supporting infrastructure such as databases and the enterprise service bus. Phurnace is in the process of integrating with provisioning automation and systems management products such as Hewlett-Packard's OpenView and Opsware, IBM's Tivoli and BMC's BladeLogic.

Competitive landscape

Phurnace's closest competition comes from configuration management vendors such as mValent and Configuresoft. The startup's claim to differentiation from them is that its offering actually delivers an application in addition to determining its initial configuration and managing it from that point. Phurnace constructs its own abstract representation of an application server's configuration and generates a series of calls to the application server's console API to execute all deployment actions. In contrast, says Phurnace, the above vendors create a file from an initial introspection of an application server and use that as the record for the future. Phurnace believes this file-centric approach is more prone to corruption and breakdown than its API-oriented approach. In addition, large enterprise Java vendors such as IBM, Oracle and Red Hat each offer deployment and configuration-tuning tools for their own application servers.

About The 451 Group
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