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Whiteboard: Thoughts and perspective from the people reshaping the IT management landscape
25 Jan 2012

First Impressions -- Three things in Three Weeks

by: jkuvlesk  |  Filed Under: General Observations, The Model
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I came to Solarwinds from one of the Big 4 in Systems Management to apply my knowledge of the application performance management market and learn new marketing skills.  I knew SolarWinds was an innovative company, a great place to work, but I did not realize how really awesome SolarWinds’ products are.  What has most impressed me about SolarWinds is the products’ functionality, product consumability and ease of the purchasing process.

 

  1. SolarWinds is very focused on the end user.  This is religion here.  We have a huge user community (thwack) where we get constant updates of what users would like to see as well as what users have developed.  We focus on developing great products with functionality that everyone can use, not just a few.  That is the trick – provide the functionality everyone needs really well (not do everything but poorly).  I believe in this mantra as well.  If you look at the maturity of business today (even some of the largest enterprises), most are just struggling to do the basics – monitoring, performance reporting, event correlation and understanding the business impact of outages.  Hardly anyone I have spoken with does predictive trending, and fancy analytics.
  2. SolarWinds is easy to try.  You can download, install and use the software in your own environment in an hour.  I saw evidence of that on my first sales call - WOW.  On the phone, the customer deployed monitors in their own environment and within seconds was seeing data/pretty charts and graphs for all 175 of their virtual machines and their AD servers.  Where I came from, this result would have taken 2 hours of remote demo time followed by a couple days of an SE at a customer site.
  3. SolarWinds is easy to deploy and manage.  You don’t need professional services or on-site training.  The UI, since it is based off thousands of customer interactions, is very intuitive.

I’ve only got time for 3 points today, but I did have one parting thought...  I need to find out why this place is called SolarWinds – we have nothing to do with solar energy OR wind technology.

 

Jennifer Kuvlesky works at Solarwinds as a Product Marketing Manager, focused on the Server and Application Management space.  She has 11 years of marketing, strategy and product management experience with an emphasis on the Systems Management market.

 

 

 

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20 Jan 2012

Endpoint Security – Best Practices to Prevent Security Breaches Originating in Endpoints

by: scastelino  |  Filed Under: General Observations
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[Ed. Note: This post is co-authored by Vinod Mohan, a Product Marketing Specialist on the SolarWinds PMM team, who specializes in researching trends and happenings in IT management market space that impact our customers.] It’s becoming a common occurrence that hospitals are being threatened with security breaches of their IT network infrastructure. This is a cause of not just worry, but alarm, requiring immediate corrective action. The Gwinnett Medical Center in Lawrenceville, Georgia, was recently hit by a virus attack . In response to the attack, the hospital increased the...
13 Jan 2012

Journey to the Cloud – How to use use private cloud to compete with external service providers?

by: robbie.wright  |  Filed Under: IT Landscape, General Observations
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We’ve all heard so much about the “cloud” and how it’s revolutionizing IT. It’s getting harder to ignore the buzz because execs are starting to get the message, and they’re asking about the company’s “cloud strategy.” So, we scramble around trying to figure out exactly what that means only to find out that cloud computing is defined differently by nearly everyone. One opinion that’s building a lot of steam is that cloud is more than just virtualization. We’re all pretty familiar with virtualization. It’s been...
12 Jan 2012

If it’s broke, do you fix it?

by: scastelino  |  Filed Under: General Observations
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I know this seems like an odd question to ask but what I’m really talking about is whether you just put a Band-Aid on the problem or whether you change the way you work to prevent future problems. In the network world the Band-Aid behavior still seems fairly common – you have performance monitoring tools to tell you when something goes down, you investigate, find a configuration issue a lot of the time, and then fix it and go on your way. How often do you stop to think about preventing those configuration issues? It continues to surprise me how many IT folks believe performance...
29 Dec 2011

The 7 Habits of Highly Successful Cloud Adopters

by: jonathan.reeve  |  Filed Under: IT Landscape, General Observations
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Whilst there have been (and continue to be) a lot of discussions around private cloud definitions, there hasn’t been as much discussion on how success is measured for private cloud initiatives or, in particular, the skills or characteristics necessary to get there. Typically, private cloud initiatives get boiled down to how IT services are provided that meet target goals for: Cost (shared, metered by use) Quality (of service) Agility (self-service, elastic) Specifically, agility (time to react to business requests/needs) is a key driver and yard stick to measure the success...