Editorial note: This is a guest post by Toivo Tänavsuu, a journalist working for Eesti Ekspress and contributing (to different tech blogs) on developments in Estonian startup scene
Estonian startup Plumbr announced $1,5M saved for its customers and releases tool to fight Java memory leaks.
Plumbr’s publicly launched first version of must-have memory leak detection tool helps to spot and eliminate memory leaks in Java applications before they affect the end user’s experience – something that is very critical for e-shops, online self-service portals, internet banks and others.
In a sense, as described by Plumbr’s cofounder and CEO Priit Potter, it is like an automated performance expert that guards your Java application, and instead of just recouping losses, it helps avoid them in the first place. In a nutshell, Plumbr is a huge timesaver for tech guys and admins: it gets to know the application and learns its memory-usage patterns, which allows it to give its users expert advice on how to solve specific bottlenecks in the system. All this happens in minutes – not hours, days or weeks, as often occurs.
“No more memory leaks and sleepless nights hunting them down,” as one of Plumbr’s slogans goes. The company explains in their recent blog post: “Three man-weeks might not sound like an awful lot, but translate that to cash and things start to look a bit sourer.
“A memory leak typically means a week or two of headaches for developers and server administrators. Every leak is application-specific and thus far there has not been anything available that would take that into account and lessen the time spent on solving leaks,” Potter says. Plumbr even claims that some developers get shivers running down their spine when they hear there is a memory leak in their application – they will never be able to estimate the amount of time it takes to come up with the solution and plug the leak.
The tool has been in publicly available as a beta since November 2011. Thus far it has gained over 2000 testers who have fixed over 200 memory leaks with it. Well-known companies such as Roche, Intel, Oracle, TeliaSonera and Logica are among the early testers of Plumbr. The majority of the customers come from Western Europe and the US, where Plumbr is currently looking for a great incubator to enter.
The company is quoting Fred Wilson saying that “a good rule of thumb is to multiply the number of people on the team by $10k to get the monthly burn.” The three weeks spent on finding and fixing a memory leak now look more like a $7,500. If now some hardcore math is applied and 200 (the number of leaks found by Plumbr) multiplied by $7,500 (average cost to plug a leak) one can confidently say that Plumbr has saved at least $1,500,000 for their early customers.
Plumbr is a spin-off of one of the biggest Estonian software houses, Nortal (former Webmedia), which itself has been a great “incubator” for several separate business units, the most successful of them being Zeroturnaround, making productivity tools for Java developers all over the world.
