 The company was co-founded by Donald Yonce (a former executive at Walmart) and his brother David Yonce.SolarWinds released its first products, Trace Route and Ping Sweep, earlier in March 1998 and released its first web-based network performance monitoring application in November 2001.According to Michael Bennett, who became the chief executive officer in 2006, the name SolarWinds was chosen by an early employee and that the company has nothing to do with solar or wind power.