VS Partner Play: PreEmptive's Runtime Intelligence
Having worked in IT publishing for nearly 20 years now, I've long subscribed to the remora-and-shark metaphor when it comes to describing the Microsoft ecosystem. Often that's been cast as a bad thing, especially when you look at the sad histories of bygone companies like DoubleSpace.
But the relationship can and does work for a lot of firms, with perhaps no better example than PreEmptive Solutions. PreEmptive got its start as a player on the Visual Studio platform back in 2003, when the company solved a real problem with applications on the new .NET Framework -- that managed applications could be easily reverse engineered to reveal underlying IP.
PreEmptive's Dotfuscator helped plug that hole, and a free version of the product has been built into Visual Studio ever since.
Like any viable Microsoft add-on provider, PreEmptive couldn't afford to sit still, and in 2006 released Runtime Intelligence, a Visual Studio add-on that enables application developers to receive telemetry about how their applications are being used in the field.
Sebastian Holst, chief marketing officer for PreEmptive, says his product provides "business intelligence for developers," enabling them to make better decisions about how to improve software, by allowing them to see how their customers use software.
PreEmptive is at the Visual Studio 2010 launch event showing off the latest version of Runtime Intelligence, which is integrated into all flavors of Visual Studio 2010. The new version of Runtime Intelligence includes monitoring of Silverlight 4 applications, and also enables developers to configure analytics from within Microsoft Expression Blend 4 beta, via the Silverlight Analytics Framework.
PreEmptive's story is being repeated over and over at the launch event, where over 50 vendors are showing (and shipping) Visual Studio 2010-compatible applications.
Posted by Michael Desmond on 04/13/2010