Immature products and false positives

Network management, he says, is full of immature products that give false positive readings, creating a great deal of extra work. "At the other end of the spectrum is BMC, Tivoli, OpenView that requires an army to run. So cost/benefit is a problem there."

In the middle, Scott found the WhatsUp Gold network monitoring tool from Ipswitch. Scott had previous experience with Ipswitch. "They always had stability, customizability and other features. About a year ago they started building managed service provisioning features into their products. Once we had heard that Ipswitch had built multitenancy into their product, giving a central view across numerous customers dispersed across a geographic region, it made our decision easy."

As a result, he signed a partnership with Ipswitch. As part of that now six-month-old agreement, Scott's developers are customizing Ipswitch's WhatsUp software for the MSP market and sending their add-ons back to Ipswitch, which then can add those it likes to the product package.

"Having been using them for the last six months," Scott says, "I think they have dollar-for-value the best technology out there for network management for a geographically dispersed user environment. They haven't marketed very much into the MSP area yet, but they could be a market leader."

Bert Latamore is a journalist with 10 years' experience in daily newspapers and 25 in the computer industry. He has written for several computer industry and consumer publications. He lives in Virginia, U.S., with his wife, two parrots and a cat.