Identify's 'black box' gets straight to the heart of the software problem

Rethink IT, Nov, 2004

"All the customer then has to do then is compare the time it took without our product to the time it took with the product," said Modai.

"Customers can start with a very light profile and gradually extend it, just monitoring one application at first. We are able to charge 100 times what a simple debugger costs, but we don't charge based on the number of black boxes you install. From one license you can install and take down as many copies of the software as you like."

And perhaps it's that rather unusual element of the licensing process that is making it successful. The black box can be in place just for a day, or permanently, across a huge organization or on a single server. That's the nature of application root cause determination, so Identify needed some innovation in licensing and now it has it.