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By Bryan Menell
Austinstartup.com
November 12, 2007
Does your organization use J2EE? Get ready to save yourself a lot of headaches.
The Phurnace story starts about two years ago. The founders spend 18 months interviewing IT managers and devising the architecture that would provide a foundation for all of the elements of Phurnace Deliver. They applied to the Austin Technology Incubator, and won the Moot Corp competition in February of 2006 which guaranteed their placements in the ATI. "Being in the incubator gives you instant credibility," said Larry Warnock, CEO. "Going through the application process is a valuable exercise that really makes you answer the hard questions about your idea and your business."
For IT professionals who work with J2EE applications, and the toolsets surrounding them like JBoss, Websphere, and WebLogic, Phurnace is a time-saver. Today, IT professionals have their own personal collection of scripts and tools that help to modify and manage application servers. Phurnace automatically can inspect all your application servers, and report back on their configuration options. That alone is huge. But the software also lets you take that snapshot and deploy the config to other application servers, for instance from a test environment to a production environment. Or migrate J2EE apps from one server to another. All with one click. "We've virtually eliminated jacl scripts," explained Dan Nelson, co-founder.
RedMonk analyst Michael Coté tells us "While Rails and other dynamic languages get plenty of headlines, Java is still a main-stay for enterprise applications. There are plenty of application servers across different versions and vendors out there that require a lot of care and feeding by system admins and other IT staff. Fiddling around with the deployment configuration and, more importantly, keeping up with that configuration - not to mention the deployments themselves - is a thankless task that can use all the tooling help the admins can get."
After using some seed money to get the concept proven, Phurnace announced a $1.3M Series A financing from DFJ Mercury in September. "Based upon the early success we've seen so far, we could be profitable without raising any more money." said Warnock. "The opportunity to grow faster, and bring more products to market quicker might lead us to seek more capital in the middle of next year." Phurnace is bringing tools and processes to IT professionals that are literally writing scripts and XML files by hand, which is not scalable or maintainable on an enterprise scale.
Jay Gardner recently joined the board of directors of the company, which is a great validation of the company and it's vision. "He has operational knowledge of how a tools company operates, based upon his 20 years at BMC Software. Having been the CIO of the company for many years, he understands how large organizations buy IT software and has many contacts with CIO's around the country" Larry Warnock informed us.
We got our first look at Phurnace at the Austin Innotech conference last month. Pricing starts at $5,000 per server under management, and prices go down on a sliding scale with additional servers. A 15-day free trial is available, and there is also a demo you can view.
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