Managed Objects Celebrates Ten Year Anniversary

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Managed Objects, the Business Service Management (BSM) Company, celebrates a decade of growth accented by a litany of awards, citations and analyst accolades capping ten years of BSM leadership. Founded in 1997, the company pioneered the BSM concept and two short years later introduced the first ever complete BSM solution – heralded by analysts and customers alike as the new paradigm in IT management. Since those early, first-to-market days, Managed Objects added over 10 million lines of code and introduced over four successive product-line versions to become the market's leading BSM provider – committed to developing new technology management innovations.

A venture-backed company, Managed Objects has raised nearly $50 million in funding to date from prestigious technology investors including JMI, Lazard, FTVentures and most recently, Intel Capital. Fueled by an impressive and growing roster of more than 300 Global 2000 customers – which span a variety of vertical markets, including financial services, telecommunications, energy, government, defense, manufacturing and IT outsourcing – Managed Objects has transformed itself from a start-up into a globally competitive IT management software vendor. The company now counts more than 120 employees with a presence in five continents, including its corporate headquarters in McLean, Virginia, European headquarters in London, and Asia-Pacific sales headquarters in Singapore.

Managed Objects is widely recognized for its strength in integration, visualization and time-to-deployment. With out-of-the-box integration adapters for more than 60 traditional IT management tools, the company's vendor neutral technology and its unparalleled ability to integrate and visualize disparate sources of IT management data onto a single pane of glass, enables IT organizations to simultaneously consolidate information from multiple management tools without jettisoning the value of those existing investments. This enables Managed Objects' customers to take a service-based approach to monitoring and managing the health, availability and performance of their IT enterprises. This in turn reduces the duration and frequency of IT outages and also improves overall IT and business service quality.

Managed Objects' success is reflected in the long list of awards and citations the company has earned throughout the years. For example, the company is a two-time winner of the UK Computing Innovation award and has been named five times to the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 – a listing of the 50 fastest growing technology companies in the Northern Virginia region. In 2005, the company was named a "Hot Stock" by Washingtonian Magazine – a feature that looks at the Washington, DC region's most promising companies – both publicly traded and privately held. More recently, the company was named a 2007 Laureate in Computerworld's exclusive Honors Program following a nomination by its customer Morgan Stanley.

Managed Objects' management team has also been singled out for leadership awards. In years past the company's chief executive Siki Giunta was named to the Washington Business Journal's list of "Women Who Mean Business" while just this past November she won the Stevie Award for Women in Business in the "Best Executive – Non Service Businesses – up to 2,500 Employees" category. Giunta and her entire management team were also collectively named as a finalist in the "Hottest Management Team" category in the Northern Virginia Technology Council's 2007 Hot Ticket Awards.

Technology research analysts also have consistently cited Managed Objects for its innovative technology and ability to execute. The company has been described by market watchers as an early and dominant leader in the BSM market for its products including its Configuration Management Database. For example in October 2007, the company was ranked the "best" BSM solution, by European analyst firm YPHISE following intensive, laboratory-based evaluation reviewing more than 180 functional and technical control items. The evaluation narrowed a long list of competitors down to five vendors, including BMC, HP, IBM and Systar, with Managed Objects coming out on top.

The ten-year tribute is especially noteworthy given Managed Objects rose to prominence during a period of prolonged economic downturn from 2001-2003 that overwhelmed many venture backed technology start-ups. Giunta, who guided the company through those turbulent times, recognizes the role a solid management team and patient investors played in seeing the company through the period, but attributes much of the success to the strength of its offering and its blue-chip customer base.

Multiple market forecasts indicate spending on systems management in 2007 approached $10 billion and is expected to continue grow to at sustainable rates over the next five years. As such, the opportunity and challenges for Managed Objects are both many and sizable – but following several years of impressive growth, the company is clearly on an upward trajectory.

Managed Objects sees the following trends as among the most influential for the future growth of the IT management arena:
• Web 2.0 fulfils its potential within the enterprise. Clearly the Internet is being used in ways we had not predicted as recently as 2000. The whole area of social networking and the long tail of Web 2.0 are still in their infancy. It is hard to imagine what Web X.0 will provide. It certainly seems the area of mobility and convergence of communications will be revolutionary and will provide unimaginable business opportunities.
• Multimedia wireless becomes more important than the Internet. It's taken generations for the Internet to make version two – yet assuming user acceptance – wireless devices will transform the way we live. The mobile phone has already made room for music, photography and mobile banking – the possibilities are limitless. This will also develop new and unforeseen challenges in the convergence and management of the underlying IT infrastructure.
• IT infrastructure in real-time. From capacity to provisioning and from storage to computing consumption, the monitoring and managing of the cost of IT service will be real-time. IT management will become increasingly automated, thereby reducing cost and introducing a higher level of reliability and predictability.

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