The Daily Network Monitor

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.

If you’ve been researching the internet for a new laptop or desktop in the past year, you’ve likely run into Jeff Jarvis’ blog about his less than impressive experience with Dell Computers. The blog series caught so much attention that it eventually earned the serial name “Dell-Hell”. The blog series eventually became a topic at Dell Corporate and an upset Michael Dell found himself under fire for allowing Dell to become customer de-focused. Further, Dell conspiracy theorists believe the blog series began the eventual demise of co-CEO Kevin Rollins who resigned earlier this year.

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I’m sure we won’t be accused of pump and dump by tipping our hat with some admiration at Cisco’s earnings report yesterday in which they reported a 41% increase in earnings. Accoridng to CEO John Chambers the results came in better than expected. I say, good for Cisco. They are providing the infrastructure that runs networks and somehow avoiding commoditization. Last week I was at their Networkers event in France, and it was packed with people who had paid hundreds maybe thousands of Euro to attend sessions all about Cisco gear and protocols.

In addition, CNN reports that Cisco’s good news brought increases in the value the stock of such firms as Intel, Juniper, and HP.