(Announcement): Pulling the Plug

It’s been nearly 4 years since we first began offering our free, hosted performance analysis services to the general public. During that time we’ve registered over 24,000 users and assembled the world’s most comprehensive repository of real-world Windows metrics data ever created.

By almost every measure, the exo.performance.network has been a success. Which is why it pains us to announce that, as of July 31, 2010, we will be shuttering the service for good. All access to the repository site will blocked at that time, and both the exo.widgets and exo.charts objects will cease to function. Likewise, OfficeBench 7 will become non-functional since it relies on the repository for results calculation and storage.

Our reason for discontinuing the service is simple: It doesn’t make us any money. We originally launched the exo.performance.network for the purpose of compiling system and application metrics and then translating our findings into new and compelling research content. However, a viable market for said content never materialized, and all attempts to secure a sponsor for the site have failed.

Recently, we toyed with the idea of upgrading the site’s functionality and then charging a modest monthly fee for access to advanced features (see previous entry regarding DMS Clarity 10 and Windows Pulse). However, we quickly concluded that the effort required to add the necessary payment processing and subscription management capabilities was impossible to justify – especially when we had no guarantee that anyone would be willing to pay for such a service should we proceed with the conversion.

So, in the end, we decided the best thing to do would be to simply pull the plug. As of July 31st, we’ll be taking down our co-located servers and converting xpnet.com to a simple, static web site. Then, we’ll refocus our energies on servicing our existing corporate clients and improving the commercial version of the DMS Clarity Framework.

It’s not the ending we anticipated when we started out on this journey over 4 long years ago, and we’ll be sad to see those server LEDs go dark. We’d like to thank those who contributed to the repository and helped make the exo.performance.network a truly unique project. It’s been an interesting ride.

Note: Anyone interested in our commercial offerings can find out more by emailing us at info@xpnet.com.