Web Profiler Got Acquired

Some of the folks may know that I wrote some code last year (when I was really bored). One of them is called “Web Profiler”, a 3-D web profiling tool that produces deep information about web performance.

Part of the inspiration of Web Profiler is due to my years of work related to Ajax and web 2.0. Starting from many years ago when I wrote an Ajax-based world processor to my Rich Internet Application tenure, I always loved what Ajax can do for my web apps, but I was also always intrigued by its performance implications.

Further, every time when I look at web performance, I got puzzled and mad. The tools, technology and offering people use today to gauge web performance are essentially what they were 10 years ago, despite that the web has changed so much. From big vendors to small shops, most web performance tools and techniques only give you a one-dimensional look. For example, most tools only tell you the network performance (request time, response time, etc). A few tools will tell you server processing time.

The reality is that web performance is 3-dimensional. Client side performance, server side performance and network performance are three inter-related dimensions that you must look at them together in order to understand web performance.

To make myself less made, I wrote Web Profiler - it measures server side, network and client side performance of any web application and present them together in a correlated way. For example, if your page loading is slow, Web Profiler can tell you the percent of time spent on client side processing, and network processing. You can look at the chart and see, “oh, yeah, it is this javascript function that is causing a long network delay that is causing the page slowness”.

Web Profiler was out in alpha and beta at RazorSpeed for a few months. It received really good feedback and strong interest from a variety of users. The alpha and beta code were downloaded over 10,000 times over a couple of months. A few hundred users actively used it to do something real(according to the log). A couple of dozens of users asked me about the pricing model and how they can pay something. A few users offered to pay something outright and I politely declined their offers.

Just when I was trying to figure out what to do with the momentum, I was approached by a couple of interested parties that see the potential of a new generation of service for web 2.0 applications. After quite a few conversations, some alcohol and a bunch of paperwork, I am happy to announce that Web Profiler has been acquired by RockStar.

RockStar is a premium brand in web performance. I met the folks there a few times and I have been truly impressed by their vision, capability to execute and market traction. It is a match made in heaven, and I strongly believe Web Profiler will achieve its full potential as part of the RockStar offerings going forward.

Unfortunately lawyers advised me not to disclose the acquisition price. Though I can say that I am very happy with the transaction. The deal is done so that I can finally say what I thought when they first told me the number they were thinking about: it is an insane amount of money (I know RockStar folks knew my thought on the number, but they believe it is worthwhile).

What’s next? I want to assure Web Profiler users that I will continue to help the product out. You can still email me bugs and complains. The folks at RockStar are going to be super helpful too.

Beyond that, given that I’ve already taken a few days off and had a few celebration drinks already, I’d better just go right back to work. So the next stop for me is yottaa. We’ll see where it leads us…Until then, happy finger workout!