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.
With our latest major product release in May, WhatsUp Gold v12, I breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, new features and new functionality to brag about. But once again the pressure was on to get more people to ‘try’ and ‘buy’. I got it! Let’s do another gimmick “Is your network healthy? Try our software and be entered to win a Wii FIT” and “Buy and be entered to win a 1 of 12, 1-terabyte Hard Drives.” So I ask you …does this type of promotion motivate you? Or are you of the mind-set, I just want the product. Give it to me at the best-price.
We’re currently running a promotion on our website for a “free copy of VoIP Monitor.” What’s the catch? Well, you need to buy a new license of WhatsUp Gold (v12). Good I guess for those who are already ready to purchase and just happen to have VoIP, but does it motivate people to “try” the software first?
I’d be interested in hearing from IT professionals.
Very interesting, but does raise some questions. Specifically, how does an SMB manage the system in an integrated fashion and make sure that the network is able to handle the additional VoIP traffic on an ongoing basis? Network management and monitoring are now even more critical to business success especially if all voice communications are now network based.
SMB IT personnel need effective network management and monitoring to provide visibility into what is going on on the network to ensure that the combination of data and voice do not degrade network performance and impact business continuity.
Many organizations have adopted this model for sales, procurement, CRM and human resources applications for example. Unlike the traditional software acquisition model, where a corporation invests in an application and is required to build the infrastructure to support the application, SaaS requires negligible upfront investment beyond user training. Application maintenance, upgrades and development are the SaaS provider’s responsibility. This is a very attractive value model for many companies.
When SaaS web-based applications are being evaluated and purchased by a corporation, the IT and network management functions are usually not included in the planning, evaluation and decision process, as IT is perceived as a roadblock. Most frequently, this effort is driven by the business unit or department accessing the application.
This lack of cooperation can cause problems to IT and network management after the application is brought on-line. IT and network management discover the application is deployed and being accessed after the fact. Usually when users contact IT or network management to complain about application performance as the application is bandwidth intensive or existing network infrastructure is near capacity. Another factor to consider is since all SaaS based applications are connected through the Internet outside of the managed corporate network infrastructure, they are subject to any number of issues including forwarding delays, connection reliability and traffic contention.
Business units evaluating SaaS as an option need to include IT and network management to allow for resource planning and monitoring of end-to-end SaaS specific application traffic to ensure that availability and performance expectations are achieved.
Au contraire, my friends, IT is a strategic asset and in most cases a competitive differentiator, and there are plenty of examples from the Fortune 500 all the way down to small businesses. Within the context of IT, it all comes down to predictable and reliable delivery of information to both internal and external consituencies. The foundation of predictable and reliable delivery of this actionable information is the network infrastructure. Unfortunately, many IT executives view the network as a utility rather than an asset, and while this is certainly understandable, it is the right view?
The real test is when the network or a server goes down. How is it viewed then? The new reality is down-time is money, no ands, ifs or buts.
IT and networking professionals need to highlight the criticality of the network as a business asset and not just a utility.
Unplanned downtime is what keeps IT professionals, executives and business owners awake at night. Natural disasters and utility failures only account for three percent of all outages. Hardware failures account for less than 10 percent of all network failures. Systems errors account for less than eight percent of failures; application errors, 19 percent.
Industry experts estimate that almost 60 percent of network failures are caused by human error. This problem can be attacked through better training for IT organizations and end-users, better network documentation, better change-management controls and processes and better network monitoring and management.
Sixty percent of network failures caused by human error? Wow. There’s no citation to back that up, but it has the ring of truth. After all, if downtime came from more controllable sources, there wouldn’t be so much of it, right?
In any case, Tim’s piece makes clear the case for effective network management and network monitoring. I hope IT managers take heed and make a small investment in protection against what could be a huge loss.
This is classic Apple. They didn’t invent the category or particularly innovate the technology, but they put together a set of existing technologies in a beautiful package that’s beautifully integrated with their other offerings. The Time Capsule is a wifi base station (seen those before) that allows USB print sharing (been there done that) and boasts up to a terabyte of network storage (yawn). So what makes this more appealing than, for example, Iomega’s StorCenter? How about out of the box integration with Apple’s Time Machine, a Vista-busting backup feature of the latest cat-themed Mac OS X? (Also, the StorCenter costs a little more, has one more USB port and RAID, and is very, very ugly.)
Sure, home network storage and backup are child’s play (sometimes literally) to the average networking pro. But ask yourself, network dudes, why can’t it be this elegant and easy at work, too?
So you can understand my mixed feelings at Carolyn Duffy Marsan’s well-reasoned but poorly-headlined piece in Network World, The IT department is dead, author argues, which reviews Nicholas Carr’s book of the moment, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google. You may remember Carr for asking Does IT Matter? in his 2004 book of the same title.
IT isn’t dead, IT departments are not dead, and IT professionals are not dead. Far from it. In fact, I think they’re all feeling much better and might even get up and go for a walk.
Now, that said, this certainly doesn’t mean that IT departments are going to be able to sit around and do what they’ve always done for years and get away with it. They will adapt or they will in fact die. To borrow one of Carr’s analogies, just because few if any businesses today generate their own power on-site does’t mean that there’s no market for power or people skilled in generating it. Those professionals just had to make some adjustments in their skills and career paths.
What Carr and many others – notably Google – are getting at is that lots of parts of IT are getting commodified (that means made into a commodity, not thrown in the commode), getting turned into utilities and getting outsourced or shared. The role of a small or mid-sized business IT pro is going to evolve in two ways because of this:
1. In-house IT will have to get skilled at managing the IT utilites: they will have to select, monitor and integrate rather than provide these kinds of services themselves
2. In-house IT will become more and more concerned with applications and business results and less concerned with infrastructure and connectivity
I think you’ll agree that neither trend will do much to reduce the demand for in-house IT. Web-based software sold on the ASP model hasn’t put IT managers out on the street, it’s just given them new and even more interesting and valuable responsibilities. If that’s dead, then I’ve got a deathwish, for sure.
Heyer’s new Advanced Remote Management Services (ARMS) provides customers with proactive remote monitoring and maintenance of Heyer [ventilation, anesthesia and inhalation] equipment — while complying with network security and regulatory practices … Heyer ARMS leverages the ComBrio Virtual Service Infrastructure (VSI), a virtual, secure IP infrastructure used for the continuous transport of real-time remote device monitoring data and on-demand access for remote device management.
Talk about a life-or-death SLA. I’d be a little worried leaving my ventilation up to the average VAR, but I’m pretty sure that the ones who figure out how to do this well will be very well off indeed. I’d even go so far as to predict some kind of IP revolution with all kinds of equipment getting network attached and coming under remote network monitoring. What a wonderful world that would be.
Further, once countries like China acquire dollars though the $700 billion US trade deficit, they will begin to dump the dollars once they suspect its valuation is in jeopardy. A country like China, which holds over $1 trillion dollars, has great power in the interconnected global economy, if it begins dumping dollars in favor of Euros thus pushing the dollar to lower levels.
For lots of software companies, the weakening dollar and weakening economy will lead to headaches in meeting growth and profitability objectives. Ironically, these companies tend to be US market centric with a bias or mis-understanding of what being a global company means. In contrast, international software companies find unseen benefits in dark clouds and the current economic status is a perfect example. Global markets offer growth, risk mitigation and excitement but you need to choose wisely. For example, it is unlikely a market like Australia with a population of 20 million people will balance a slowed US economy entirely but it is probable that a select list markets will offer opportunity to supplement the decline in US markets.
Further, being global does not mean you need local representation in every country though that decision is highly dependent on product characteristics like price, complexity and training to name a few. For those that build easy to use products like WhatsUp Gold, the internet and the ecommerce business process offer great opportunity for revenue and profitability enhancements.