Executive Profile - Steve Goodman is CEO of PacketTrap Networks. Steve was previously Vice President of the Storage and Business Continuity Business Unit at SonicWALL (NASDAQ: SNWL), a leading provider of network security and IT infrastructure solutions. Steve successfully built the Storage Business Unit from zero to over a $20 MM run rate in less than two years. Previous to SonicWALL, Steve was founder and CEO of Lasso Logic, a continuous data protection (CDP) appliance company focused on IT disaster recovery solutions. Steve has a M.S. in Computer Science from The George Washington University. Steve's addiction to high stakes poker matches has had no impact on his ability to lead PacketTrap Networks.
Q: Steve, thank you for agreeing to LoveMyTool’s “Executive Corner” interview. When we met up in Vegas, you mentioned that PacketTrap was actually funded before you and your co-Founder even finalized on your business plan. Having been an entrepreneur for the last fifteen years and with some familiarity with venture capitalists, I am obviously quite impressed by this accomplishment. I believe it speaks volume of your successful track record. Can you take this opportunity and explain to our readers your background and your last company, and how it does or does not contribute to the genesis of PacketTrap?
A: Well, my academic background is computer science, but my DNA is entrepreneur. My father was a technology entrepreneur in the semiconductor space and still knows lots of people in Silicon Valley. I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. I started at Accenture (formerly Andersen Consulting) almost 20 years ago, and developed a series of technology based learning applications.
A group of us left to start Learning Productions, a company that first pioneered online simulation learning technology. We sold the company to Skillsoft (SKIL), which is the world’s largest provider of online certification courseware for Cisco, Microsoft, Juniper etc.
While working with end user IT departments at Skillsoft I discovered a need in the SMB and middle market for disk-based continuous data protection - and started Lasso Logic, which was funded by Outlook Ventures. We sold the company to SonicWALL, which has now sold the product into more than 20,000 IT environments supporting over 150,000 data volumes.
In working with SonicWALL’s channel and IT end users, it was clear that a major pain point for them was managing their networks – which are expanding exponentially and only getting more complex. Thus we identified a pain point that wasn’t being solved well, an underserved market, and an enormous opportunity.
Before we sold Lasso Logic to SonicWALL we had the option of working with Sequoia Capital or August Capital for our next round of financing, but in the end we decided the best place for Lasso was under the umbrella of a company with a world-wide distribution platform.
In the process we developed a great relationship and respect for the folks at August Capital, so when we started PacketTrap it was a perfect match for us. I guess being an entrepreneur is just in my blood though.
Q: Thanks, Steve. That’s just fascinating. Now the first time that I was exposed to PacketTrap was at Sharkfest, the user conference for Wireshark and I understand that while PacketTrap’s product is not open-source necessarily, your business strategy is actually quite intertwined with the Open-Source movement. Can you elaborate on that and give us a 10,000 feet overview of PacketTrap’s product and roadmap? And specifically, who are your competitors? And if you don’t have a direct competitor as many startups do not, from the customers’ standpoint, what would be their alternative solutions to what you do?
A: IT departments in the middle market are many times stuck purchasing enterprise software solutions purpose-built for Global 1000 companies. That’s a problem. Because these solutions are too complex, difficult to maintain, and exuberantly expensive for middle market companies. Take HP Openview and IBM Tivoli etc for example. Openview’s feature set is overkill for most middle market companies and its price point is most times out of reach. Enter PacketTrap; we can solve many of the same problems as an HP Openview at 1/10th the price. The closest competitor to us is SolarWinds, a company that I have admired from afar for several years.
On the open source side, we take great pride at being the only commercial vendor in the networking space that allows users to pipe the output of their open source products into a commercial dashboard. That is, if an IT department already uses MRTG or Cacti, for example, they can pipe in those graphs and charts into our dashboard. So then the user benefits from some of the better open source products, but, at the same time, the open source product is coupled with our network and application management application to provide a fuller, richer experience. Together with open source we solve a larger pain point for the customer, and allow IT departments to manage their network in a single interface. We view open source as our partner, not a competitor.
Q: There have been lots of discussions on “freemium” which I understand to be a business model whereby a company offers basic services for free, while charging a premium for advanced or special features. I understand that PacketTrap has both a basic application that anyone can download for free and a PRO version that is not free. As fellow entrepreneurs, can you share with us your experience with this strategy (the do’s and don’ts)?
A: Sure. Good question. First, the foundation of the “freemium” model is to provide the user a basic understanding of your business proposition, the type of company you are, and of capture market share. We view all of our users as partners, even if they only use our free products. The advantage to the “freemium” model is that it increases your user base and general market exposure quickly. Also, if you provide high quality software like I think we do, it creates a larger pool of users to have a conversation with about what they like and don’t like. This is huge for us because almost all of our features come from user feedback. So the more users, the more feedback we receive.
Where you need to be careful is the quality of the users. That is, free software tends to sometimes attract users who are only curiously seekers and don’t necessarily have a pressing need for your solution. A second disadvantage to the model is perception. Some users may infer that free software equals low quality software. There is nothing further from the truth. After all, there’s plenty of costly software out there where the quality is pathetically poor. But that’s a topic for another day!
Q: Thanks again. Finally, to wrap up, tell us about your customers and who would benefit from your creation, so our readers would be motivated to visit your website.
A: We focused mostly on IT departments with at least several people and /or companies with between 100 and 5,000 end points. Our target users are network engineers, system admins, and IT managers who are challenged managing ever expanding heterogeneous IT networks. We also tend to work with lots of departments of larger multi-national corporations. In fact, Oracle is our largest customer, even though they are a Fortune 500 company.
Readers should check out two specific offerings from us:
- Tools for Network Engineers
The PacketTrap pt360 Tool Suite consolidates dozens of network management and monitoring tools into a single, integrated interface. There are two versions:
- PacketTrap pt360 ToolSuite Free Version: Includes Ping scan, Enhanced Ping, Graphical Ping, Trace Route, TFTP Server, and WHO IS utilities.
- PacketTrap pt360 ToolSuite Professional Version ($495): Includes free version features plus DNS Audit, SNMP Scan, Switch Port Mapper, Cisco Netflow Support, Port Scan, Wake-on-LAN, Network Traffic Simulator, Cisco Router Configuration Manager, WMI Scan, MAC Scan, Network Discovery, Network Inventory, Application Monitoring (SQL and Exchange), syslog server, server monitoring, and a graphical network dashboard.
- Network Troubleshooting and Remediation Platform
PacketTrap Perspective: A software platform which allows system / server and network management of an organization's IT infrastructure, both locally and distributed. It auto-discovers system resources and their metrics, including hardware, operating systems, virtualization, databases, middleware, applications (SQL and Exchange for example), and services. It watches hosts and services that the user specifies, auto-remediates problems, and alerts users when performance deviates from a user defined baseline. It allows an IT department to view the network from any users “perspective”, thus solving bandwidth and connectivity issues more quickly. It also provides historical charting and event correlation for faster problem identification. The system is accessed via a web browser and /or a client application.
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