ENGINEERING
A Conversation with Etnus CEO Chris Doehlert
By Steve Fisher, Editor In Chief -- Etnus, well known for its debuggers for complex code, announced in late February that it experienced all time record sales and overall revenues in 2001, against the backdrop of a bearish economy and the events of 9/11. In addition to attaining sales and revenue records, the company reported that it grew its customer base by 37%, enjoyed a 47% increase in the number of downloads of its TotalView debugger, and recorded a 44% increase in the number of licenses in existence. Supercomputing Online sat down with CEO Chris Doehlert recently to see just how Etnus pulled off these numbers.
SCO: Tell us about the record numbers Etnus has experienced and let us in on why you think you’ve been so successful, particularly in such a rough economy. DOEHLERT: Yes, we did manage to grow despite the economy. We don’t publish actual results, we’re part of a parent company that doesn’t publish results of its subsidiaries, so I can’t give you specific numbers, but the reason we’re growing, we think, is that we do have the best debugger around and developers are realizing that a good debugger is as critical to them as for instance, CAD tools have been for mechanical engineers and electrical engineers. And particularly for developers at the high end, debuggers are absolutely essential. So we think we’re going against the overall market as the awareness of TotalView, and the recognition for the value it provides becomes visible to everybody. SCO: What market is TotalView present in today and where (which markets) do you see it going in the future? DOEHLERT: Certainly we’re dominant and absolutely preeminent in high performance computing. There isn’t a high performance computing system that goes out without TotalView these days whether it be from the U.S. vendors, the Japanese vendors, or what have you. So, HPC is our traditional stronghold. The growth in the recent years as we’ve focused on being a product-based company, has been in a whole bunch of different segments and it’s all over the map. It’s entertainment, people like Pixar. It’s oil and gas, which is arguably HPC, but a particular segment of HPC, it’s not the pure research or government part. It’s places like Internet commerce like Amazon. We’ve got some healthcare people, we’ve got all sorts of businesses. No one vertical is where we are. SCO: Why are people finding TotalView? Why would they acquire TotalView when some debuggers come free with their hardware? DOEHLERT: Well, you’ve been around this community. You’ve probably heard the story. The traditional mindset was that sure if there’s a free debugger people would use it, but they would often get frustrated because it either didn’t give the correct answer, or wasn’t robust enough and it would crash, and sometimes that pushed people back into using simple printf’s and getting by with, shall we say the most basic method of debugging, not using any tool at all. What we’ve done a lot of is increase the industry’s awareness of TotalView in the last few years. We’ve spent money on advertising, we made sure we did a broader cast of what we’re about and what we found was that people who used TotalView found it robust, found it feature-rich even to such a degree that we have multiple stories where people installed it and within hours solved bugs that they’d been working on for weeks. We have a case in weather forecasting, we have another one in the Internet security space where truly, as soon as they installed TotalView they solved the problem that they hadn’t been able to crack before. So, it’s traditional marketing. It’s getting the message out, getting the message out, getting the message out. SCO: Are there any recent success stories in the HPC space that you’d like the readers to hear about? DOEHLERT: Interesting question. We’re so prevalent there, it’s basically you name the system and we’re likely to be on it. So, Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center for instance is a customer of ours on their new Compaq machine. Just prior to that was the CEA installation. The growth in the ASCI White machine, we’re on all the ASCI systems. If you’re in the Teraflop range, you’ve got TotalView. SCO: What about the new bad boy called the Q System that’s supposed to supplant ASCI white as number one on the Top 500 list. Are you involved in that? DOEHLERT: Absolutely. We’ve been working with Compaq while it was still…we worked with all the vendors that were involved in the bidding process and we’ve been working with Compaq since then making sure that TotalView would work on that machine when it gets delivered. SCO: Is there anything you’d like to add? DOEHLERT: For the HPC community, I would want them to rest entirely reassured that we remain committed to HPC. We see our work in expanding into the commercial segment as a way of ensuring that we’ll be here tomorrow to help the HPC community, not an attempt to flee it. The HPC community is exactly the community which is most demanding and most absolutely requires TotalView and we’re delighted to be there.
SCO: Tell us about the record numbers Etnus has experienced and let us in on why you think you’ve been so successful, particularly in such a rough economy. DOEHLERT: Yes, we did manage to grow despite the economy. We don’t publish actual results, we’re part of a parent company that doesn’t publish results of its subsidiaries, so I can’t give you specific numbers, but the reason we’re growing, we think, is that we do have the best debugger around and developers are realizing that a good debugger is as critical to them as for instance, CAD tools have been for mechanical engineers and electrical engineers. And particularly for developers at the high end, debuggers are absolutely essential. So we think we’re going against the overall market as the awareness of TotalView, and the recognition for the value it provides becomes visible to everybody. SCO: What market is TotalView present in today and where (which markets) do you see it going in the future? DOEHLERT: Certainly we’re dominant and absolutely preeminent in high performance computing. There isn’t a high performance computing system that goes out without TotalView these days whether it be from the U.S. vendors, the Japanese vendors, or what have you. So, HPC is our traditional stronghold. The growth in the recent years as we’ve focused on being a product-based company, has been in a whole bunch of different segments and it’s all over the map. It’s entertainment, people like Pixar. It’s oil and gas, which is arguably HPC, but a particular segment of HPC, it’s not the pure research or government part. It’s places like Internet commerce like Amazon. We’ve got some healthcare people, we’ve got all sorts of businesses. No one vertical is where we are. SCO: Why are people finding TotalView? Why would they acquire TotalView when some debuggers come free with their hardware? DOEHLERT: Well, you’ve been around this community. You’ve probably heard the story. The traditional mindset was that sure if there’s a free debugger people would use it, but they would often get frustrated because it either didn’t give the correct answer, or wasn’t robust enough and it would crash, and sometimes that pushed people back into using simple printf’s and getting by with, shall we say the most basic method of debugging, not using any tool at all. What we’ve done a lot of is increase the industry’s awareness of TotalView in the last few years. We’ve spent money on advertising, we made sure we did a broader cast of what we’re about and what we found was that people who used TotalView found it robust, found it feature-rich even to such a degree that we have multiple stories where people installed it and within hours solved bugs that they’d been working on for weeks. We have a case in weather forecasting, we have another one in the Internet security space where truly, as soon as they installed TotalView they solved the problem that they hadn’t been able to crack before. So, it’s traditional marketing. It’s getting the message out, getting the message out, getting the message out. SCO: Are there any recent success stories in the HPC space that you’d like the readers to hear about? DOEHLERT: Interesting question. We’re so prevalent there, it’s basically you name the system and we’re likely to be on it. So, Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center for instance is a customer of ours on their new Compaq machine. Just prior to that was the CEA installation. The growth in the ASCI White machine, we’re on all the ASCI systems. If you’re in the Teraflop range, you’ve got TotalView. SCO: What about the new bad boy called the Q System that’s supposed to supplant ASCI white as number one on the Top 500 list. Are you involved in that? DOEHLERT: Absolutely. We’ve been working with Compaq while it was still…we worked with all the vendors that were involved in the bidding process and we’ve been working with Compaq since then making sure that TotalView would work on that machine when it gets delivered. SCO: Is there anything you’d like to add? DOEHLERT: For the HPC community, I would want them to rest entirely reassured that we remain committed to HPC. We see our work in expanding into the commercial segment as a way of ensuring that we’ll be here tomorrow to help the HPC community, not an attempt to flee it. The HPC community is exactly the community which is most demanding and most absolutely requires TotalView and we’re delighted to be there.