While a significant milestone in and of itself, SIOS Technology Corp.’s recent foray into machine learning represents only the latest leg of an innovation journey that traces back decades to the dawn of distributed computing in the enterprise. On the second episode of the two-part series dedicated to the launch, chief operating officer Jerry Melnick dived into the road so far with host Dave Vellante.

SIOS began its life under the name SteelLife Technology at the height of the dot-com bubble as a provider of high-availability clustering software for Linux, then an emerging niche where its offerings stood practically alone. That predictably drew industry attention and the then-startup quickly found itself acquired by a Japanese company whose brand it then adopted.

The newly-renamed SIOS continued along its course as an independent subsidiary, expanding to new use cases but maintaining the original focus on high-availability clustering, Melnick told Vellante. That hasn’t changed much since then, although the underlying technology most certainly did.

A few years after its acquisition, virtualization started taking over from the plain physical servers that organizations have historically used to power their high-availability applications.  “The lure of cloud computing and virtualization attracted [our] customers as well,” Melnick said. “They’ve been the slowest to move, but now they’re really going, we’re seeing that in our business today and we’re seeing a lot of changes as a result.”

The shift naturally posed some challenges, given that its software was originally developed for physical environments, but also presented a valuable opportunity. Virtual machines represent a stark departure from the well-defined and predictable constraints of bare-metal hardware, Melnick explained, that require an entirely different approach to management.

And so SIOS IQ, the company’s first major shot at modern analytics, was born. The software attempts to hide way the complexity of virtualized infrastructure behind a sleek interface that provides administrators easy access to key metrics along with recommendations on how to optimize them. It became available a few weeks ago for $150 per host per month.