According to Webster's dictionary, a panacea is a "remedy for all diseases, a cure-all, a solution for any difficulty." And that's what secretive startup Panacya (pronounced the same, but with a different spelling) hopes to be in the area of managing Web-based e-commerce applications.
By year-end Panacya plans to unveil software for end-to-end monitoring and troubleshooting of critical commerce applications. The software, now in beta tests with several Web-hosting providers, is designed for use by corporate Web managers as well as technical personnel in the data centers of application service providers and Web hosters.
"We're trying to provide a business-service view into all this," says John Greene, Panacya's senior vice president of marketing.
A single e-commerce application often comprises many pieces: a Web server farm, catalog or publishing software, application middleware, back-end database and content upgrade software. All these components may be housed on computers at a Web-hosting facility, an application service provider or the customer site. Often the application's critical parts are running at different sites, which can make it hard to diagnose problems when they occur.
The Panacya software has to collect data from multiple sources to determine if an ISP congestion problem is the issue or whether a back-end database is not working properly to serve content. Company officials declined to share more product details.
Panacya's founders, Franco Negri and Kelly Jones, hail from Computer Associates. Negri had been the vice president of marketing and product line manager for CA's network management suite, Unicenter; Jones had carried the hefty title "technical visionary" at CA's security business.
With some private venture capital, Jones and Negri quietly founded Panacya in January to develop a line of high-end e-commerce management software that a company spokesman acknowledges will likely cost customers at least six figures. Whether the software will really be a panacea for e-commerce network woes will become clearer this winter when the company makes it more generally available.