The Daily Network Monitor

It’s like having your cake and eating it too. WhatsUp Gold earned a sweet first-place rank in CRN’s Network Management Solution Bake-Off, beating out solutions from Ad Rem and Solar Winds. It’s gratifying to see the WUG team’s hard work recognized not only for creating great technology but also for making the product so channel-friendly. The reviewer pointed out WhatsUp’s features and the benefits of Ipswitch’s partner program.

The application offers an intuitive interface and a high level of customization for its features. WhatsUp Gold Premium combines many network-management features and trending databases with extensive packet intelligence, supporting SNMP 1/2/3 and WMI devices.

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There’s no fee to join Ipswitch’s three-tier partner program, but it requires an annual revenue commitment and technical certification. Ipswitch gives leads to partners and offers pre-sales, post-sales and technical support.

The test center setup was a great simulation of a typical SMB network, with one Microsoft and four Linux servers running web, email, firewall and SQL server running on them, two workstations, two Cisco switches and an HP printer. Just to jazz things up, the engineers added an Apple MacBook to the environment partway through the test. These kinds of dynamic, heterogeneous networks are more and more common in businesses of all sizes. In these days of consolidation in the IT press, it’s good to see that CRN still takes the time to do thorough, real-world testing.

As you may know, Ipswitch recently partnered with Wiley Publishing to produce Ipswitch Network Monitoring for Dummies by Robert Armstrong. It’s not available in stores or even on Amazon.com, but if you visit us at one of our upcoming events, such as Network World IT Roadmap or Cisco Networkers, you just might get a copy.

When the idea was first floated, I was skeptical. Our customers are far from dummies. Some of them could teach classes on networking. Some probably do. But I was proven wrong (again) by the popular response. People with serious networking credentials love this book! Sure, it’s a tribute to the power of the “Dummies” brand, but it’s also a powerful message about simplicity and clarity.

Networking professionals have complex jobs supporting increasingly complex systems that make businesses run. Never underestimate their need for simple, clear, easy-to-use tools and information. This is a big part of what has made Ipswitch and especially WhatsUp Gold successful - making the complicated things easy, making the easy things effortless, and turning blobs of data into actionable information. This is what’s gotten WhatsUp noticed lately by PC Magazine, PC Pro and CRN, to name just a few.

If experience is the name, we use to describe our mistakes then Ipswitch and specifically the WhatsUp brand has gained lots of experience in the past 2 years. In 2005, after nearly a decade of building a brand with the name WhatsUp Gold that is still the envy of product competitors of all sizes, Ipswitch changed the product name to WhatsUp Professional. While sales increased dramatically and usage skyrocketed, the emotional attachment experienced with WhatsUp Gold name did not ring true for the name Professional.

The 17th century English Statesman George Savile wrote, “The invisible thing called a Good Name is made up of the breath of numbers that speak well of you” Our customers did in fact speak and we have listened. After two years of the Professional name, WhatsUp is being relaunched in 2007 as WhatsUp Gold and audiences from external users to internal developers to the media at large could not be more pleased.

A colleague of mine from a previous company told me the story of the Coca Cola debacle and while I am not foolish, to think our situation was as large and public as the ‘new coke’ one – the attempt at parallels is humorous.
In 1985, after 99 years, Coca-Cola decided to switch to a new sweeter and smoother coke–more like its archrival, Pepsi.

This historic decision was preceded by a top-secret $4 million survey of 190,000 people, in which the new formula beat the old by 55 percent to 45 percent. What Coca-cola apparently neglected to take into account was that many of the 45 percent who preferred old Coke did so passionately. The 55 percent who voted for new Coke might have been able to live with the old formula, but many on the other side swore that they could not stomach new Coke. Coca-Cola’s announcement change provoked outraged protests and panic stockpiling by old-Coke fans. Soon, Coca-Cola backed down and brought back old Coke as “Coke Classic

I can’t say that we have made WhatsUp any sweeter unless the term “sweet” can be used to describe “more features, more power and easier to use”. I also can’t claim that resellers and end-users were stockpiling boxes of the old WhatsUp Gold in protest. I can tell you that our customers advised, even yelled that Professional was a bad choice and we listened. Welcome back WhatsUp Gold; the product is new but the name is classic.