“Sapphire has not only been an invaluable investor, but a true partner along our startup journey. From the very start of our partnership, Sapphire understood and believed in our mission and vision, helping us achieve our business goals by making invaluable introductions to customers, partners and advisors, as well as supporting our efforts in building our talent pipeline. Simply put, Sapphire has been critical to our success.” – Varma Kunaparaju, CEO and co-founder of OpsRamp
Last month, HPE completed the acquisition of OpsRamp, a Sapphire portfolio company and leading AIOps platform for IT Operations Management (ITOM). We are thrilled for CEO Varma Kunaparaju and the OpsRamp team on the next chapter of their journey as they join the HPE family.
Founded in 2014, OpsRamp built a market-leading SaaS platform to help Enterprises and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) visualize, control, automate and optimize their hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure and applications. Through the OpsRamp AI-powered IT operations platform, customers are able to get complete visibility; streamline event management; introduce intelligence to their IT service delivery processes; automate workflows and routine tasks in a scalable manner; and, unify observability of their end-to-end hybrid IT environments.
A customer-centric founder at the helm
While we’ve always loved the value proposition and tangible customer impact of the OpsRamp platform, we have been even more impressed with the team led by Varma, innovating tirelessly behind the scenes to bring robust, easy-to-use technology to market.
Throughout his career, Varma has continuously sought out some of the most complex, large-scale tech problems to solve. An engineer at heart and entrepreneur by trade, he has a proven track record of building and delivering enterprise software and founding and leading information technology companies over the course of three decades in the industry.
Varma Kunaparaju,
CEO, OpsRamp
Prior to co-founding OpsRamp, Varma spent more than a decade in the IT operations management space with Netenrich, where he was co-founder and CTO. Before Netenrich, Varma was co-founder and VP of Engineering of NexPrise, a collaborative B2B e-commerce software vendor, helping guide the company to its listing on the NASDAQ.
Across all of his experiences working in high-tech engineering, one thing has remained consistently true: his deep passion for building disruptive technologies and leading high-performing go-to-market teams. The willingness to dream big, run towards (not away from) challenges and create technologies with the customer top-of-mind has put Varma in a league of his own.
Automating IT operations across environments
Organizations today are increasingly investing in technology and processes to cost-effectively improve customer satisfaction and employee experiences in order to compete in competitive markets and in a less-than-favorable macroeconomic environment. As the backbone of a company’s technology assets, the IT function in particular has been undergoing widespread digital transformation, overhauling workloads that were previously run in a highly manual, non-repeatable fashion with fully automated, data-driven workflows.
The push for capabilities like real-time observability, cloud-native IT services and more have led to an explosion in disparate point solutions that capture large volumes of event data from mission critical systems and generate alerts. Though the technology innovation in this space has been welcomed by practitioners, it has ultimately created a phenomenon known as alert “noise,” whereby IT teams are inundated by unnecessary and avoidable incident escalations stemming from an overwhelming volume of data being collected.
The practice of AIOps has emerged as a solution to this problem, leveraging machine learning to intelligently filter, correlate and prioritize alerts so that IT professionals can focus on the highest impact issues first. As a leader in the AIOps, observability and automation markets for ITOM, OpsRamp not only provides customers with an end-to-end AI-powered platform to identify the right incidents to remediate, but also offers intuitive workflow automation to help IT coordinate the right systems and teams to actually address and resolve the issues identified.
Why we first backed OpsRamp
We initially met Varma and his team back in 2017, and were thoroughly impressed with the level of industry experience, product domain knowledge and camaraderie amongst the leadership team. At the time, the transition from on-premise to hybrid IT was in full-force, creating demand for a solution like OpsRamp, which quickly became the leading SaaS-based ITOM vendor in the market and ultimately, was able to win several blue-chip enterprise deployments early on while gaining recognition across the board by top market analysts at Gartner, Forrester, IDC and others along the way. The value and impact of OpsRamp for customers was evident, and reflected clearly in the company’s rapid and capital-efficient growth–a dynamic that we viewed as critical validation of product-market fit and strong operational rigor.
We are excited about the path that lies ahead for OpsRamp as a part of the HPE family. The technology capabilities and go-to-market reach of the combined teams will make true multi-vendor and hybrid, multi-cloud IT visibility and management a reality for organizations around the world.
From the Sapphire team to the innovators, thinkers and doers at OpsRamp, we wish you the best of luck on this next phase of your journey!
Legal disclaimer
Disclaimer: Nothing presented within this article is intended to constitute investment advice, and under no circumstances should any information provided herein be used or considered as an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy an interest in any investment fund managed by Sapphire Ventures (“Sapphire”). Information provided reflects Sapphires’ views as of a time, whereby such views are subject to change at any point and Sapphire shall not be obligated to provide notice of any change. Companies mentioned in this article are a representative sample of portfolio companies in which Sapphire has invested in which the author believes such companies fit the objective criteria stated in commentary, which do not reflect all investments made by Sapphire. A complete alphabetical list of Sapphire’s investments made by its direct growth and sports investing strategies is available here. No assumptions should be made that investments listed above were or will be profitable. Due to various risks and uncertainties, actual events, results or the actual experience may differ materially from those reflected or contemplated in these statements. Nothing contained in this article may be relied upon as a guarantee or assurance as to the future success of any particular company. Past performance is not indicative of future results.
