Xaffire Inc.: tech startup of the month.

• Author: Peterson, Eric
• Position: High Tech

Where: Superior

www.xaffire.com

Founded: April 2003

INITIAL LIGHTBULB

Born out of the merged assets of two dot-com startups--Colorado-based Alignment Software and Austin, Texas-based Matrix NetSystems--Xaffire is focused on an emerging niche in the website monitoring space: capturing and replaying "user sessions" from websites as an aid in diagnosing bugs in their computer code. "So far, the industry doesn't have any way to solve these software problems," said Xaffire CEO David Jilk. "(Programmers) work hard on QA, they try to have good development processes, they try to do all the right things, but bugs are going to get through."

As Matrix focused on monitoring external connectivity and Alignment's technology kept watch on the user's internal system, investors "figured if they merged the two, they'd have a cross-firewall solution," said Jilk of Xaffire's 2003 genesis. However, the Colorado-Texas schism and limited customer base made it difficult to leverage the marriage of the technologies, leading Xaffire to sell off Matrix's intellectual property and refocus the company on its content-capture tools. Xaffire's home base is the Mobius Venture Capital incubator in Superior. The company has 20 employees.

IN A NUTSHELL

Xaffire's flagship product is Xfire, so named because it is a "cross-firewall" web-monitoring product. Jilk described Xfire as software that monitors three categories of problems related to online applications. First, it tests connectivity, making sure a system's servers are connected to the World Wide Web with beacons in data centers scattered around the country. Second, Xfire monitors infrastructure, alerting the administrator if the system's hardware, databases or other critical components are not working properly. Third (and most important, said Jilk), Xfire helps diagnose the inevitable software glitches--a.k.a. "website warts"--by capturing interactions with customers to be replayed by troubleshooting developers later.

"The solution ... is the equivalent of a TiVo," Jilk said. "Xfire sits on the server and records every single user session, everything your browser...