As President of Ipswitch Inc.’s Network Management division I have had the opportunity to speak with many of our customers about their experience using WhatsUp Gold.
Now, because WhatsUp Gold can be deployed and utilized in a variety of ways, each new story I hear varies from the last. But I have noticed a few common themes over the years. One such theme sounds like this:
“The phones stopped ringing as soon as it was deployed on the network.”
In fact, a few weeks ago I had a new customer call up our sales team and rave about the silence he and his team have enjoyed since they implemented WhatsUp Gold on their network. No more phone calls about the network being slow, that this server is down, that the Internet isn’t connecting, etc.
Because of the powerful systems and performance monitoring WhatsUp Gold delivers, these guys are finally the first to know when something is wrong on their network. They can now fix an issue before it affects their users.
This latest customer interaction reminded me of our history with job-search-giant, CareerBuilder. As a longtime user of WhatsUp Gold solutions, our product has literally grown along with CareerBuilder’s company.
In its early stages in 2003, at a point when the job search site was just one-fifth the size of the market leader, they brought in WhatsGold to solve their basic monitoring needs. As they’ve grown and matured, becoming the nation’s largest online job site, WhatsUp Gold has stayed a step ahead to continue to provide them the tool-set and functionality they need to manage a network that now includes close to 1300 devices.
Despite the evolution of technology and the increasing complexity of networks and managing solutions, we know that with most of our customers it is still the little things that make such a big difference. Mark Fouraker, Technologist at CareerBuilder, touches on just that in a favorite quote of mine from this customer story:
“My favorite story about WhatsUp Gold is when I was in an important meeting and was getting silent alerts on my pager about an impending issue on our network. I was sneaking out at breaks to troubleshoot and address the matter, eventually resolving it. The bottom line is that no one outside of a few people in operations had any idea there was even an issue at all. It’s just a beautiful product.”
A story like this is really powerful, in my opinion, because it shows how technology can evolve and customer needs can change, forcing us to continually adapt and innovate our product to meet those changing needs. It also shows that business relationships can certainly last as long as it remains mutually beneficial, with a bit of give and take from both sides.
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!
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!
The House of Representatives recently passed bill HR4137, raising troubling questions about privacy rights on college campus networks. While the bill itself is a tremendous education package, one section covering “Campus-based Digital Theft Prevention” is igniting heated debate throughout the blogosphere. Bill HR4137 requires administrators to perform network filtering, profiling and monitoring students for potential illegal activities.
In addition, the bill requires that colleges provide a P2P file-swapping alternative, which may be as simple as public link to the iTunes Music Store or as complex as a suite of network monitoring tools for administrators and file-sharing applications for students. Failure to comply with these mandates could result in the withholding federal funds fromdelinquent campuses, though there is currently no pressure to adopt new technology foran un-passed bill. If federal funding were affected, universities could venture to lose access to Pell grants, Safford and Perkins student loans, which could directly effect applications and admission rates.
While the use of peer-to-peer networks does not necessarily constitute illicit illegal activities, this kind of network monitoring could harbor many negative feelings among users. For this reason, EDUCAUSE, the foremost association of network administrators amongst college campuses, have consistently opposed these kinds of privacy invasions, as the use of VPN tunneling and encryption can easily be subverted by resourceful and persistent users.
While many believe this provision in HR4137 is nothing more than a concerted effort by lobbyists championing the broken business model of the entertainment industry, it should be noted that the Motion Picture Association of America recently revamped their numbers regarding film piracy losses from college campuses (they cut their estimate of 44 percent by two-thirds). And while it is not news that the MPAA is hardly a credible source for metrics in the creation of law, the impact of their influence in Washington DC remains to be seen. Without the opinions of industry professionals, I fear this bill could result in something far more sinister and start us down a slippery slope of profiling and restrictions on innovation and research. Academic officials should not allow legislators far removed from the complexities and needs of college campuses to determine how to run their networks. HR4137 is just another overreaching attempt by the government to pry into student’s lives and play with our equipment.
Voting history on bill HR4137 can be found here at opencongress.org. Whichever side of the fence you fall on regarding this issue, I encourage all of you to contact your Congressional representative and voice your opinion.