Apparently Brilliant

One of the more interesting demos that was at VMworld this week was at the Apparent Networks booth. The company has moved its AppCritical performance monitoring software into the cloud so that, rather than buying and installing a monitoring tool, customers can instead go to a self-service portal for monitoring critical business applications. So not only can an IT department sign up for Apparent's monitoring service, but even a business unit can monitor its applications with little or no IT intervention. This is an interesting example of how infrastructure companies can use cloud computing services to modify their business models and reach broader audiences.