As you know, we just released V-locity version 5. Here’s the director’s cut.

We committed a slew of engineers to several months of development to build an enterprise-class management console for V-locity. In a world where a couple developers with a few pizzas can create a robust app from scratch in 6 weeks, that represents a lot of apps!

Our previous management console didn’t scale beyond 500 nodes and didn’t play well with modern environments that span geographic locations with a hybrid of virtual and physical servers while provisioning some workloads to the cloud.

That meant a console needed to be built that has the ability to auto-detect the most complex environments and batch deploy V-locity in seconds. A management console that is aware of the new world order of hybrid environments – virtual, physical, cloud – and deploy and manage to all from a single point.

Customers asked for flexible pricing models whether it be volume perpetual licenses or site licenses or even subscription, and so we listened. They asked for I/O performance management that delivers insight into the anatomy of I/O behavior on all their workloads from virtual server (or physical server) to storage to help take the guesswork out of performance troubleshooting. Customers wanted to be able to set up alerts based on workload thresholds. They asked for a console that could validate V-locity before/after performance across workloads and have ongoing performance validation for continued ROI transparency.

So we built it. The whole enchilada.

Typically, when the baton is handed to marketing, the first two questions are almost always the same – “What do we call it?” and “What do we charge for it?”

When you commit engineering resource the size of a small island, the very first temptation is to productize, to monetize, to ROI-ize what you put in because there is a cost to building products.

Then again, this wasn’t really a stand-alone product, but rather a big enhancement to an existing product.

A lot of companies charge for that enhancement. Many of you have purchased hardware or software products, only to find a separate line item and SKU for the management software itself to manage the product you purchased – the never ending high tech rabbit hole of monetization where you buy cars but batteries and steering and tires are not included.

As my daughter tells me, “Dad, everyone does it.” So, in our initial brainstorming session, we kicked around the idea of doing it too. But when it came down to it, we agreed it’s not in the core tenet of our business model to disrupt.

V-locity provides performance at 1/10th the cost of the hardware alternative. That’s disruption. And in that spirit of disruption, we decided against productizing and charging for the management console.

It’s bundled with V-locity and available for free to every V-locity customer under maintenance. No extra charge required. No extra hardware required.