By kmyers
Thanks to our partners we are able to reach a large and diverse number of international clients. This wouldn’t be possible without the exceptional help of our International Distributors of the Year for 2009:
Infinigate Deutschland in Europe, Middle East and Africa; ZeroOne Technology Taiwan in Asia Pacific; and LicenciasOnline in Latin America took charge in their respective regions and delivered impressive results.
The WhatsUp Gold Partner Program provides WUG ninjas such as these with resources, certifications, marketing opportunities, expertise, and training on the most up-to-date WUG products. Through collaboration like this, WhatsUp Gold stands to reach network managers in need of solutions in every corner of the world.
Want to learn how to become a WhatsUp Gold Partner? Visit our Partner Section.
Want to find a partner near you? Find one now!
Popularity: 37% [?]
By WUG Team
About a month ago we posted a blog with a link to a white paper on the top ten requirements for a network and systems management solution.
Not long after it was posted a WhatsUp Gold user commented and told us he was disappointed with our list. It didn’t provide him with the broader information of the Network Management universe he had expected to find he said. Instead he said he felt like our paper read a bit too much like marketing material for WhatsUp Gold.
Now, of course we’d love to see every network in the world monitored by WhatsUp Gold because we know the strength and versatility of our product and firmly stand behind its functionality across the board.
But . . . we’d rather have our customers leave a conversation with us, leave our web site, our blog, our community site, feeling like they got more than a sales pitch from us. We’d rather a customer, or a potential customer, leave with more knowledge about the NM space than they came in with than leave with a WhatsUp Gold service agreement.
And so we went back to work. We took a second look, a third and fourth look, at our Top Ten Requirements list and we added to it and altered it until we felt we had something you would be able to use a resource when researching the best possible Network Management Solution for your network.
Click here to check out our new and improved Top Ten NM Requirement List.
It’s completely free to take look, so please do. And as always, feedback is more than welcome!
Popularity: 65% [?]
By Ennio Carboni
I had them all with me tonight – Information Week, CIO, Redmond, eWeek and Network World. Not surprisingly, the world of technology continues to be a world of contradictions and that’s a good thing. Ever since we all witnessed the battles on the airwaves 10 years ago between Cisco (promoting the paperless office) and Xerox and Canon promoting the highest, fastest volume outputs of paper and we in technology took a side that contradicted a colleagues comment or belief – continuing our debates over coffee, beer and long inescapable air flights.
Enter the time machine and here we are 10 + years later and a world of new contradictions.
The jury is still out on SOA. Proponents argue that a distributed, nimble set of web services that replace large monolithic systems is the future. Proponents claim the economies of scale, re-use and distributed network friendly design poses huge benefits for adopters. Yet, the early poll and interview results are uncovering hosts of problems that are frustrating the heck out of CIO and subordinates. Application performance, application reliability and security are all questions and issues in need of a solution.
The jury is in on Virtualization and the ruling looks like guilty for all. We (I) am committed to virtualization like no ones business. Yet, I am reading tonight that the early adopters have already begun to uncover the pitfalls and it would be best to look to third party management companies when deploying a virtualized environment. I cannot say this is a contradiction in pure form but it fits my blog so give me a little break here.
Last, the story that made my night. MIT on Thursday morning will unveil a new working forum whose goal is to expand Kerberos to wireless technologies. Isn’t Kerberos dead? I guess Kerberos really does have 3 heads, I mean lives.
Popularity: 1% [?]
By Ennio Carboni
I often debate with friends in the IT industry on the merits of chasing business in the SMB. Lots of friends agree that the growth in the SMB sector continues to be strong but they argue that re-designing existing products for SMB’s has proven to be less than a profitable venture. I disagree with the entire rationale for reasons that might not appear to be obvious.
The reason most ventures have been unprofitable has little to do with the market and more to do with the philosophy of 99.9% of companies who try to push down complexity to SMB’s with new packaging. SMB thrive on easy to use yet effective solutions for complex environments. Vendors who service that market with dedication are profitable. Those that just repackage complexity with a simple title end up failing and end up going back to the enterprise to sell.
When will the vendors learn?
Popularity: 1% [?]
By Ennio Carboni
I have been out on the road the past few weeks but I am glad to be back. I was reading about the latest data theft at Boeing today. A disgruntled employee with the intent of hurting his employer placed sensitive data on a thumb drive with the hopes of leaking it to a local Seattle newspaper. As you probably guessed, this man is unlikely to receive any employee awards or merits. What really caught my eye in this story was the ‘potential’ financial impact had the newspaper not done what is right – a whopping $5-$15 billion loss was possible. If you’re like me, your wondering what the heck the data said? Did it unveil the material makeup for it new dream liner or was it indicative of bad business practices?
One of my favorite security lecturers is Bruce Schneier. If you ever have the chance to listen or speak with Bruce, you’ll be entertained and well educated by the end. In reviewing this data breach, Schneier bring up valid points of practicality, “If a company hires an untrustworthy employee, there is almost nothing it can do to prevent theft”, Schneier argues. “What’s done in African mines is they do full-body cavity strip searches every time they leave. That works,” Schneier says.
I’ll talk more about USB thumb drives in a future entry but in the meantime, check out RedCannon Security. I can’t validate whether or works yet but these guys caught my eye as a needed innovation in the security space. RedCannon says it can restrict the types of USB drives that are plugged into computers, monitor what data is pulled from a hard drive, and remotely destroy content if the thumb drive is inserted into an Internet-connected computer. As an extra safeguard, RedCannon says its products can set USB devices to stop working when they are not inserted into a computer connected to the Internet
Popularity: 3% [?]
By Ennio Carboni
I’ve written about this before and after reading this latest review by Denise Dubie of Network World I couldn’t resist.
If your currently a network and operations management customer of a Big 4 vendor, namely HP, BMC, CA or IBM your likely as upset as 640 of your colleagues and looking for a change in course and performance. After all, Denise stated that 40% of respondents gave the Big 4 a C grade and 30% gave the forbidden D grade. What is going on? You pay hundreds of thousands of dollars if not millions and all you get is C & D grade performance, service and respect?
Denise notes a Gartner report that says, “”Continuing customer satisfaction issues, the emergence of new technology and service delivery approaches, and the rise of large technology infrastructure providers expanding their capabilities into management software all contribute to making these industry leaders vulnerable.”
For more years than we care to count at times, visionary vendors like Ipswitch and a host of other SMB management vendors have dedicated productive time and thought to designing products that are effective in resolving pain yet easy to use. For years, the Big 4 dismissed us all as point products while they continued to fatten their products with hard to use features. As markets have matured in knowledge and grown in frustration, I feel exhilarated to know that our plan to build usable products was not only the right plan – it will make a difference in thousands of networks across the globe.
Popularity: 1% [?]
