Continue reading "Network Performance Daily Links 2006-11-15" »
NetQoS has opened a 5,000 square foot office in Durham, N.C., to advance the company’s network and application performance technologies.
The Research Triangle Park area afforded NetQoS the opportunity to add a well-balanced team with experience across the gamut of a product lifecycle, including planning, engineering, and documentation.
The facility serves as our second development center in the U.S. and is being staffed by 10 new employees with an average of 15 years of experience building commercial-ready software products. Comprised mostly of software engineers with backgrounds in IP network and system management products, the Durham team will focus on adding features and introducing new products to the NetQoS Performance Center suite.
More information can be found in our press release.
Continue reading "Network Performance Daily Links 2006-10-14" »
Continue reading "Network Performance Daily Links 2006-11-13" »
Akamai and JupiterResearch have put out a press release saying that they have conducted a study which concludes that 4 seconds is the maximum threshold for retail Web surfers before they move on to other Web sites.
People are a bit dubious on Slashdot, pointing out that Akamai is a company that sells Web caching services and would release a study that tells retailers that they need to speed up their Web sites to increase their own business.
And it does seem that four seconds seems a little short. It’s hard to believe that Web surfers don’t have the attention span to– Hey, there’s some guys playing Ping Pong like they’re in the Matrix!
Continue reading "Network Performance Daily Links 2006-11-10" »
Virtualization is certainly one of the hottest buzzwords at the moment. And that's no surprise when the value proposition appears so compelling: being able to do more, or at least the same as before, but with less.
Whether you are applying the concept to servers, operating systems, applications, or storage devices, virtualization seems to come from some kind of IT heaven. However, it does add a significant layer of management complexity and if you're not careful, can quickly lead to IT hell.
Charles Babcock recently wrote in InformationWeek about some of the complexities of virtualization in the article entitled, "Virtualization Runs Into Some Potholes." Among other things, the article describes the challenges Tony DeFelice, manager of end user software at the Pennsylvania healthcare provider WellSpan Health, faced when consolidating 15% of its 350 servers over the past 12 months:
"The software wouldn't load on client machines unless someone with administrative privileges reset PCs to accept them. DeFelice learned the hard way that extending virtualization to more users and applications adds a layer of management complexity."
And as Clint Boulton sums up so well in the Internetnews.com article "IBM Tabs The 'Next Frontier",
"While customers may be trimming their hardware deployments with virtualization software, they still have to account for the virtual servers present on physical servers. So, while clients no longer have 100 physical computers to manage, they still have 100 virtual computers to manage."
The obvious way for organizations to reap the rewards of virtualization while avoiding the headaches is to measure a lot and manage often. Real management comes from an informed understanding of measurements, set against a sense of how values have varied over time (usually in terms of some well-defined frame of reference called a baseline). This approach permits deviations themselves to be measured, and lets management occur when and as thresholds are crossed, or when variances exceed preset values.
So despite the management complexity, the benefits of virtualization are making it compelling for many organizations. And regardless of the hype, it's obviously here to stay. The InformationWeek article states that 79% of companies with 500 employees or more have adopted server virtualization or will within a year, according to a survey of data center managers by Sage Research.
Listen in as Siemens' Enterprise Applications Manager Rick Paulus discusses his challenges and techniques in insuring the success of a shared services model for Siemens' remote sites and dozens of data centers in the Western Hemisphere. Just click on the link and begin listening to this podcast. [.mp3, 12MB]
NetQoS is a company that, like all companies, is designed to make money, among other things. It's fair to understand everything we do we as springing from the belief that it will benefit our bottom line, directly or indirectly. Our corporate philosophy is based around the idea that our business will only succeed if we solve customer problems, and we provide the software, appliances, and services that can do so. But we do want to succeed.
We’re not evil or malevolent about it. In fact, we tend to think that companies that are in business to generate profits off of shoddy products or by ticking-off customers to satisfy the balance sheet do eventually tend to shoot themselves in the foot. So in the interests of full disclosure, we are hereby admitting that part of the reason for this blog is that we want to use it to promote our brand promise--our relentless drive toward performance. Equally important, we will use this to interact with our customers, helping them to solve problems and get ideas from their peers, so that we can increase customer satisfaction, grow our business, and, in the end, make more money.
But of course you already knew this. Collectively, you are smarter than we are, and we're convinced that some pretty darn smart people work here.
There’s a bunch of books written on the collective intelligence of the masses that turn to blogs for information, including Jeremy Wright’s Blog Marketing, Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searles, and David Weinberger’s Cluetrain Manifesto, Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, and so on. The simple truth is this: everybody who is any sort of expert on blogs, blogging, and the blogosphere tends to agree on one thing: If your company acts childishly, it will get spanked.
If companies misrepresent themselves, (or as a 5 year old would put it: “fib,”) as “Wal-Marting Across America” shows, they get found out. When Alienware threatened to refuse computer review site Hexus access to their systems for coverage (or as a 5 year old would put it, “I’m taking my ball and going home,”) they got tons of negative publicity and a story on Digg.
If we ever do something stupid, call us on it. If you have a question, fire away and we’ll do our best to answer. We’re trying to make money – yes – but this blog is doomed if we try too hard to make money and lose sight of the conversation to which we want to contribute.
So we’re putting away our childish things. And the first childish thing that we need to put away is the fear of being seen as childish.
Or more appropriately, the fear that what if we say anything that isn’t approved by a pyramidal hierarchy of managers and directors, that hasn’t gone through the “marketing spin machine” to make sure we’re “on message,” that we’re somehow going to look “unprofessional” if we start talking less like the corporate bleh that comes out in most slick corporate communications. We fear it because this “bleh” has been the language of business, and we are a business-to-business business.
But let’s put away that childish fear, let’s put away the idea that somehow our products or our professionalism are maligned because we’d actually say, on-line, in official communication, something that comes from what we really feel, unfiltered, and unabridged. Something that doesn’t use the latest buzzwords just because it has to, something that, in the great scheme of things, lets our readers be more informed because we’re speaking English… no, not just English, but Human.
From time to time, we’re going to be putting stuff out there. It may have too much “marketing lingo” or “technical lingo” or any number of other “lingos.” It may go too far in the other direction and seem "disingenuously hip." If you think something could be phrased a better way or is irrelevant, or is too complex, or too simple, then please, let us know. If we fail to provide new information, if we fail to make ourselves understood to you, then we have failed in the primary mission of any blog - to communicate.
And if we fail at doing that, we won't make as much money.
Continue reading "Network Performance Daily Links 2006-11-08" »
