Today’s tale from the front lines of network management comes to us from a company that’s been in business for eleven decades. They’re a logistics company with offices around the U.S. And they literally started with a horse and a cart. They have bought several companies along the way, keep their eyes on the future, and learned the value of technologies that help them grow.
Buying other companies means buying incompatible systems that are managed with different tools. The IT team at the company decided they needed to do three things before system issues got out of hand:
- Choose one network management product
- Centralize monitoring for all locations
- Commit to an internal service level agreement
They agreed that the network management product they picked would have to scale for dozens of locations and hundreds of devices, handle the distributed environment, and give them the ability to be more proactive. They assumed they’d buy a solution from one of the big vendors, but, as one IT manager said, “Not only were these solutions high-priced, they required extra dedicated staff and extensive training. It was not cost effective for a company of our size.”
Then a network administrator spoke up and recommended WhatsUp Gold from Ipswitch. He had used it at his last company. According to the IT manager, “We downloaded a trial and liked it right away. We quickly saw that WhatsUp Gold could monitor what we need to monitor – it had what we needed without unnecessarily complicated features or excess cost.”
So the company that started with one horse and a cart, and grew because they knew how to look ahead, picked WhatsUp Gold. Scalable? Check. Distributed monitoring? Check. Support for proactivity? Check.
Oh, and the price not only fit within the budget, they actually saved money by replacing lots of licenses for different tools with just one license for WhatsUp Gold Premium and the plug-ins they needed for managing network bandwidth, configurations and applications.
Happy? Check.
[Care to take our product out for a spin?]