All About Faddom

Faddom, one of the leading developers of hybrid application dependency mapping tools, has become a key solution for organizations dealing with the challenges of today’s IT environments. Faddom’s solution enables companies to quickly map business application dependencies in real-time, delivering insights that simplify daily operations, cost assessment, migration planning, and decision-making.

From its humble beginnings to becoming a venture-backed leader in application dependency mapping, Faddom’s story is one of innovation, strategic growth, and a steadfast commitment to addressing some of the most pressing challenges in modern IT management.

In this Vendor Spotlight, we take a closer look at Faddom's journey, its innovative product offerings, and how it is reshaping the way organizations manage and optimize their IT environments.

The Founding of Faddom

Faddom was founded in 2010, at a time when the IT landscape was increasingly moving toward hybrid environments—combinations of on-premises infrastructure, cloud-based services, and various third-party solutions. The founders saw an unmet need for a tool that could help organizations understand how their applications and IT infrastructure interacted across these different environments.

Faddom's mission was to tackle some of the most pressing challenges in enterprise IT: understanding and managing application dependencies and IT infrastructure. The company’s innovative tool provides organizations with a clear, consolidated view of their entire IT landscape, making it easier for IT consultants, infrastructure administrators, and organizations as a whole to manage and optimize their infrastructure.

The company initially went by the name VNT, reflecting its early focus on providing IT professionals with the visibility and data necessary to manage increasingly complex networks. As the company evolved, it recognized that the term “dependency mapping” better captured the core of its value proposition: helping businesses visualize the intricate web of connections between different parts of their IT systems and understand the impacts of those dependencies on system performance and reliability.

Company Evolution and Branding

In mid-2019, Faddom began working with Inspired Marketing to refine its corporate strategy. The goal was to sharpen the focus of its product offering to better meet the needs of its target audience, while also improving the company’s branding and messaging. This partnership helped Faddom rebrand itself and more effectively communicate the value of its unique features to its customers, especially its ability to map dependencies in real-time and without causing disruption to existing operations.

As part of this rebranding, Faddom also updated its company name from VNT to its current iteration. This shift represented a move toward greater clarity in the market and a recognition of its core competency—mapping dependencies and providing deep visibility into hybrid IT environments.

Market Impact and Industry Position

Since its founding, Faddom has built a strong reputation in the Business/Productivity Software industry, particularly in the SaaS vertical. With an impressive portfolio of customers spanning various sectors, the company has made a name for itself by offering a simple yet powerful solution to one of the most complex challenges in IT infrastructure management.

Faddom has also secured venture capital backing, enabling it to continue innovating and expanding its reach. Despite its relatively small size, with only 44 employees, the company has gained significant traction in its niche, providing essential tools for IT teams, consultants, and administrators working with increasingly hybrid and complex environments.

Headquarters and Global Reach

Headquartered in Ramat Gan, Israel, Faddom operates in a dynamic global market, serving customers across multiple industries and regions. The company's solutions have become particularly valuable to businesses looking to streamline their IT operations and optimize their infrastructure without the disruption or performance degradation that often accompanies traditional mapping and scanning tools.

Timeline of Key Events and Milestones

• 2010: Faddom (originally VNT) was founded in 2010 with the goal of addressing the growing complexity of IT infrastructure management, particularly around mapping application dependencies across hybrid IT environments.
• 2015-2018: During this period, Faddom’s product began to gain traction in the market, especially within the Business/Productivity Software and SaaS industries.
• 2019: Faddom began a partnership with Inspired Marketing to help refine its brand and messaging. The rebranding from VNT to Faddom marked a clearer focus on application dependency mapping, aligning the company’s name with its core mission.
• 2020: Throughout 2020, Faddom’s hybrid application dependency mapping tool saw a significant uptick in adoption, particularly among large organizations and IT consulting firms.
• 2022-2023: Faddom received recognition for its innovative approach to Business/Productivity Software, particularly for its ability to map complex, hybrid IT environments without using agents, credentials, or active scans. Notable awards include the Most Promising Startup at the Las Vegas IT conference and the Startup Spotlight winner at the VMware Explore Awards.
• 2024 and Beyond: As of 2024, Faddom has raised $12 million Series A funding,  grown its team to 30 employees, and is now a key player in the field of hybrid application dependency mapping.

Faddom’s journey from its founding to its current status as an innovative leader in application dependency mapping illustrates the company’s ability to adapt and evolve in response to the growing complexity of modern IT infrastructures. With continued investment in its technology and a focus on delivering value to its customers, Faddom is well-positioned for further growth in the coming years.

Faddom’s Product Suite

Faddom's flagship product is a hybrid application dependency mapping tool that provides IT teams with a real-time, interactive view of their entire environment. Faddom’s core technology allows for the discovery and visualization of IT assets (such as servers and business applications) and their interdependencies. The platform operates passively, with read-only permissions, ensuring that there is no impact on the environment's performance or security. Faddom’s solution runs continuously, updating the topology in real-time to ensure that businesses always have up-to-date and accurate information about their IT ecosystem.

The tool helps organizations uncover application dependencies and communications, which can then be leveraged for a variety of critical IT functions, including:

• Cost assessment: With a clear understanding of application dependencies, businesses can more accurately assess their infrastructure costs and identify opportunities for optimization.
• Hybrid ecosystem discovery: In today's multi-cloud and hybrid IT environments, Faddom provides visibility into all of an organization's infrastructure—whether on-premises, in the cloud, or across third-party providers.
• Workload migration: By mapping dependencies in real-time, businesses can make informed decisions about moving workloads between environments, ensuring that no critical connections are disrupted in the process.

Faddom’s approach is built on the principle of passively collecting as much IT infrastructure data as possible without imposing on the system or requiring active interventions. This method preserves the integrity and performance of the IT environment, while still offering valuable insights. A 14-day free trial is available upon request.

What Makes Faddom Different?

What sets Faddom apart from traditional dependency mapping tools is its ability to function without requiring credentials, agents, or any kind of active scanning that might disrupt performance. This non-intrusive approach makes it an ideal solution for businesses that need insights into their systems without causing any disruptions to ongoing operations.

In other words, Faddom’s fast deployment, agentless design, and user-friendly interface make it stand out from others. Unlike many enterprise tools that require complex setups or agents, Faddom enables users to get started in just a few minutes—from download to seeing their first map.

Faddom also differentiates itself through its cost-effective pricing model. It offers a simple, transparent pricing model based on the total number of servers an organization manages. The pricing structure is flexible, with options for organizations of different sizes with no additional charges for support or unexpected fees, overcoming a common challenge in enterprise software.

Key Features:

• Agentless, Passive Discovery: Faddom operates without installing agents or requiring active scanning, which minimizes performance impact and enhances security.
• Real-Time Mapping: Faddom continuously updates its application dependency maps to provide a dynamic view of your IT infrastructure.
• Cloud & On-Premises Support: The platform seamlessly works in hybrid environments, including both cloud-based and on-premises assets.
• Comprehensive Asset Discovery: Faddom automatically discovers and maps all IT assets, including physical and virtual servers, business applications, databases, and network components.
• Cost Optimization Recommendations: Identifies underutilized resources and provides actionable recommendations for rightsizing infrastructure, helping businesses reduce operational costs.
• Network Security Insights: Offers visibility into east-west traffic, helping spot potential lateral movement risks, and enabling microsegmentation.
• Compliance & Audit Support: Provides businesses with accurate, up-to-date information needed to meet audit and compliance requirements.

Practical Use Cases of Faddom

Faddom’s hybrid application dependency mapping tool provides a versatile solution for a wide range of IT needs. Below are some key use cases where Faddom delivers significant value:

1. Asset Documentation and Discovery: One of the foundational challenges in IT management is maintaining accurate documentation of assets and topologies. Without a clear and up-to-date view of an organization’s infrastructure, any IT project is at risk of failure. Faddom solves this by providing continuous, automated discovery of all IT assets, including servers and business applications. The tool operates 24/7 to map out an organization’s hybrid IT environment, giving IT teams holistic visibility into their infrastructure. This real-time mapping ensures that businesses have reliable asset documentation, laying the groundwork for successful IT projects, whether for upgrades, migrations, or audits.
2. Data Center Migration: When undertaking IT infrastructure migration—whether it's a disaster recovery project, cloud migration, or on-premises consolidation—mapping application dependencies is crucial. Faddom helps ensure business continuity by enabling organizations to identify which applications and servers need to be migrated together. By accurately mapping these dependencies, Faddom allows IT teams to build accurate move groups, ensuring that related systems are migrated together without breaking crucial connections. This capability is invaluable when planning complex migrations like on-premises to cloud, cloud repatriation, or data center transformations, where failing to account for dependencies can lead to costly disruptions.
3. Application Change Management: Before implementing any changes to an IT environment, understanding the potential impact of those changes is critical. Whether you are updating, adding, or decommissioning servers, Faddom’s application dependency mapping helps you predict how these changes might affect the broader IT ecosystem. By visualizing the relationships between different business applications, Faddom ensures that any modifications are carefully planned, avoiding disruptions, and preventing costly failures. This makes it an essential tool for change management, helping organizations maintain operational stability during updates or transitions.
4. Resource and Cost Optimization: Faddom is also a powerful tool for IT resource optimization. By providing full visibility into an organization’s infrastructure, the tool helps identify underutilized or dormant servers and proposes rightsizing measures for both on-premises and cloud instances. This allows businesses to reduce unnecessary costs, improve resource allocation, and optimize performance without needing additional integrations with other tools.
5. Network Security: Faddom plays a critical role in network security, providing a lightweight network detection and response solution. The tool helps businesses eliminate the risk of lateral movement by visualizing all east-west traffic (traffic between servers within the same data center or network). This visibility allows IT teams to spot unfamiliar connections, identify potential vulnerabilities, and receive alerts about traffic anomalies. Faddom also supports microsegmentation planning, shadow IT discovery, and SSL certificate tracking, all without the need to install agents or alter firewall rules. By mapping network communication patterns, Faddom enhances security posture and helps prevent unauthorized access.
6. IT Audit and Compliance: For organizations operating in regulated industries, IT audits and compliance requirements are an ongoing challenge. Faddom simplifies this process by providing a complete, dynamic view of both cloud-based and on-premises IT environments. By mapping assets in real-time, Faddom ensures that businesses always have accurate, up-to-date information for audits and compliance checks.

Challenges Faced by Faddom and How They Were Addressed

Faddom faced several challenges as it developed and refined its hybrid IT mapping solution, particularly in its early stages as the company sought to differentiate itself in a competitive market. Here are some key challenges and how they were addressed:

1. Complexity of Hybrid IT Environments: One of the biggest hurdles was the difficulty in providing accurate visibility across hybrid infrastructures that span on-premises data centers, private clouds, and public cloud environments. Traditional tools didn’t offer a unified view of the entire IT ecosystem. To address these issues, Faddom took a unique approach by offering a completely agentless, passive discovery model. This meant that Faddom could map out an organization’s entire IT environment—across physical servers, virtual machines, and cloud instances—without requiring any intrusive installations or active scanning.
2. Complexity of Use and High Technical Barriers: Traditional enterprise solutions often required deep technical knowledge and a dedicated IT team to operate effectively. Faddom overcame this by focusing on creating a self-service, user-friendly interface that allowed users of all technical backgrounds to use the platform with ease, enabling users of varying technical backgrounds to deploy and use the software with minimal training.
3. Complex Pricing Models: Enterprise software typically comes with complicated pricing structures, hidden fees, and high costs, making it hard for businesses to budget. Faddom addressed this challenge by adopting a simplified pricing structure that is transparent and cost-effective, removing the complexities and hidden fees often associated with traditional enterprise solutions. By addressing these challenges, Faddom was able to create a solution that is both powerful and accessible for organizations of all sizes.

Wrap-Up

In this Vendor Spotlight on Faddom, we've explored how this innovative company has carved out a niche in the complex world of IT infrastructure mapping and management. By offering a hybrid application dependency mapping tool that delivers real-time, agentless visibility across both on-premises and cloud environments, Faddom addresses key challenges faced by modern organizations, including security risks, performance issues, and the complexity of managing hybrid IT ecosystems.

Faddom’s product suite has evolved in step with the growing complexity of IT environments, offering tools that assist with data center migrations, resource optimization, network security, and IT compliance. Whether organizations are looking to migrate to the cloud, optimize resources, improve network security, or ensure regulatory compliance, Faddom provides the visibility and tools needed to make these tasks more efficient, secure, and cost-effective.

Looking ahead, Faddom is well-positioned to continue its growth as the demand for hybrid IT solutions and cloud-native technologies increases. As organizations continue to adopt more complex, multi-cloud environments, Faddom's ability to provide unified, agentless mapping will be crucial for helping businesses optimize their IT infrastructures.

The future of IT mapping is likely to see even more focus on automation, real-time analytics, and AI-driven insights, areas in which Faddom is already making strides. Its continued commitment to enhancing its offerings in line with emerging technologies makes it a valuable partner for organizations looking to improve operational efficiency, minimize risk, and gain greater control over their IT environment.