Entrepreneur's Next Big ThingEntrepreneur's Next Big Thing

Many people know that Robert Fabbio was a founder of Tivoli, and a few might even know him from his new company, Vieo Inc., in an emerging segment of the systems-management market. What most wouldn't know from meeting him is that this serial entrepreneur is also a confirmed clothes horse. His closet tally has reached more than 100 pairs of shoes, 50 watches, and 30 suits--even though Fabbio never wears a suit to work.

He's just as passionate about his new business, building an appliance for making data centers more efficient and self-correcting, what Vieo calls adaptive application infrastructure management. Vieo showed off a demo of the appliance at a trade show last month and will have the product in testing in April, initially supporting Apache, BEA WebLogic, Linux, Oracle, and Solaris environments. It's slated for general availability midsummer.

Fabbio's big idea is that management problems will grow as computing platforms shift from client-server to modular and that manag-ers need systems that redirect resources across an environment, rather than just alert them to problems. Vieo's appliances are built to monitor and optimize an entire system, rather than optimize application by application. "We're a switch that connects everything that we manage," Fabbio says. "The management solution runs on the switch. We can see every interaction that occurs at all tiers within the application environment and affect resources needed to run apps."

It's not a little dream that Vieo's got in mind, nor small competitors standing in the way. When Fabbio joined Vieo last fall, he told company leaders, "We're going to build the next Cisco, with a reinvented Tivoli on steroids inside the box." It was intuition--and bravado--more than facts at the time, but he says the market is becoming reality now. "The positive response to what we're doing from industry analysts far surpasses any kind of response that I've seen in my career," he says.

There will be no shortage of big competitors standing in the way. While it's taking a unique approach, the company has to contend with conventional system-management vendors such as BMC Software, Computer Associates, and Tivoli, plus the utility-computing ideas that IBM and Hewlett-Packard promise, since they'll need to offer some similar vein of adaptive computing, says Richard Ptak of Ptak & Associates, system-management consultants.

But Vieo is offering a creative approach to a big problem, Ptak says. With the analysis system on an appliance, it can optimize elements with an eye toward total performance and will probably penetrate to the department level and to midsize companies. Nevertheless, Vieo needs to overcome a hostile market. "The big problem they're going to have to overcome is the state of the market--questions of whether they're going to be around in two to three to five years," Ptak says.

That's one reason Vieo lined up nearly $15 million of venture capital early this year, to assure the market that cash wasn't a problem. The investments, led by Rho Ventures along with Audax Group, Eyes of Texas Partners, Flagship Ventures, and TL Ventures, bring total funding for the company to $39 million.

Don't count on Fabbio's backing off. He's been an entrepreneur since age 4, when neighbors called his parents to say he was trying to sell tires he'd taken off his toy cars. He and his colleagues are hoping the need for Vieo's appliance is a lot hotter than used Hot Wheels.