By: Ken Spencer Brown
ksbrown@bizjournals.com

MetricStream founders Arvindh Balakrishnan and Ramana Mulpury should have recognized an omen in the hurricane that grounded the pair in their Orlando hotel 18 months ago. That was the night they conjured up the idea of starting a business together.

The outcome is a venture that takes up 12 hours a day for the newly married Mr. Balakrishnan and gives Mr. Mulpury so little time with his family that his infant son recently has had trouble recognizing him - prompting Mr. Mulpury's wife to issue an ultimatum about the length of this workday.

Family issues aside, the chaotic effort appears to be paying off. MetricStream recently snagged a $4 million investment from a Southern California competitor and is gearing up to announce deals with three big-name consulting firms that will sell the product.

"It's like a drug," says Mr. Balakrishnan, an amateur guitar player who was getting antsy at his former Oracle job. "I get such an adrenaline rush, it takes me about two hours to unwind when I get home. I don't think I could go back and do a single-dimensional job."

Quest Software, a fast-rising Orange County company that makes database-management software, invested the $4 million after hearing about MetricStream through one of its integrators, who was installing both companies' applications for a client.

Quest chief executive Vinnie Smith, a former Oracle employee, consummated the funding less than a week after first hearing about MetricStream.

The Southern California firm has been on an acquisition spree over the past year, setting the stage for a purchase Mr. Balakrishnan says he would consider under the right conditions.

But for now, MetricStream's founders are focusing their efforts on making their venture profitable. They won't say how much money they're bringing in, but say they have several big-name customers and are signing on several others.

Their application is designed to provide an easy-to-use window into the data generated by customer-relationship management software, enterprise resource management systems and other corporate databases. MetricStream simplifies the information by singling out aberrations, a process Mr. Balakrishnan terms "management by exception."

In other words, most business execution issues come down to finding deviations in a company's processes: say, a vendor that habitually defaults on payments, or a product that takes an unusually long time to ship.

By highlighting these anomalies with graphs and charts, MetricStream promises to make better use of the business management systems that corporations already have in place.

Extracting the same data without the MetricStream system is a laborious process that requires specialists who know the intricacies of a particular setup, Mr. Balakrishnan says.

Hiro Ono, IT project leader at IDEC corp.'s Sunnyvale office, says MetricStream's system helped IDEC pull in and use information that was spread across several Oracle databases and difficult to incorporate into usable form.

The average MetricStream installation costs $250,000 and works with Oracle and PeopleSoft applications. The company is working on integrating the product with SAP and other systems.

Brian Jones, an analyst with market researchfirm Yankee Group, says MetricStream will have its work cut out for it in a market with dozens of companies promising the same sort of access to their data. Competitors probably will include data warehousing companies and makers of the very systems with which MetricStream works, who might decide to bolster their products with similar features.

"It's hard to differentiate when you have so many players," Mr. Jones says. "But there's a tremendous amount of growth in the industry."

The move is a gamble for the two cofounders, both of whom are 31 and have little entrepreneurial experience. Before founding MetricStream, Mr. Mulpury had left Oracle to run his own consulting practice, but admits his current undertaking is far more intense.

Neither entrepreneur expected the venture to uproot his life to this degree.

Both spend most of their time at the office. The stress probably is less intense for Mr. Balakrishnan, who at Oracle traveled so much between Dallas and Philadelphia that he bought two sets of clothes, home furnishings and guitars. He recently arried and hasn't had time to play any of his four instruments, though one of them sits in his office.

Mr. Mulpury has been married a little while longer, but a new baby has made life a bit zany. He moved into his guest house so he could focus more on the business, then the indulgence offered by his wife.

"She's giving me a year to get the company in shape and get back to a regular schedule," he says.

Ken Spencer Brown is a member of the Business Journal's technology team.