Kevin Thompson, President & CEO A sharp mind, Donald Yonce, working as a network engineer for Walmart, believed the tools that had been handed over to him to perform his job were not good enough and that he could build better ones. “So that’s what he did,” says Kevin Thompson, CEO, SolarWinds. The Walmart engineer wrote a tool at home and uploaded it online, making it freely available to download and try for 30 days. To his amazement, the application took off and started to sell, and not just that, it eventually brought in enough revenue that he could invest in his business. “He managed to pull the business to about $20 million in revenue and $18 million in profit with about 15 employees,” extols Thompson.
This Walmart engineer was none other than the brains behind the IT management software company—SolarWinds. Years later, when the company instituted a professional management team with Thompson as the CEO, SolarWinds still comprised of only 18 to 20 employees, but had already started climbing the ladder of success with 40,000 customers. “We were smart enough not to screw up the equation. And started expanding with the existing workforce,” evinces Thompson. Today, SolarWinds has become an 18-year-old titan, running a gamut of IT management solutions, with network and server management at its core. “We continue to be a try-and-buy model, we don’t customize the software, and don’t have any consultants,” stresses Thompson. Since the very inception of the company, SolarWinds’ mission has been to provide purpose-built products that are designed to make jobs easier for IT professionals. “If there is a piece of network, anywhere in the world where performance monitoring matters, it’s entirely doable for SolarWinds to provide an outstanding technology to manage it,” states Thompson.
Best-in-Breed Monitoring
SolarWinds’ Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is a comprehensive network-monitoring product, delivering real-time information and analysis for routers, servers, and switches to reduce network outages. Network monitoring is a captious part of any IT department’s software tools, allowing businesses of various sizes to figure out how to maximize their network resources. Hence, choosing the right tool for this application is an important decision. NPM is designed to be a one-stop solution for both performance monitoring and fault analysis. It has a reporting feature that enables the creation and scheduling of custom automated reports.
We invented NPM v12
to sweep aside the
uncertainties of the
cloud—to let firms monitor
every node, every path,
and every network
NPM’s intelligent alerts feature allows users to create a myriad of various network alerts, testing for multiple conditions if desired. Alerts can be configured with different combinations of events and times, and sent to recipients through multiple channels. Alongside customizable alerts, NPM is composed of ‘hundreds’ of pre-loaded alerts in its system. NPM imbibes the capability to accelerate network performance troubleshooting of on-premise, hybrid, and cloud applications and services with critical path hop-by-hop analysis.
"It’s a very different strategy than most software companies have because we are not trying to sell firms a solution"
It is a brave new networking world out there with a mishmash of public and private connections. Most engineers opine that adoption of cloud technologies is vital for the organizations’ long-term success but at the same time, it is implausible for organizations to completely migrate their infrastructure to the cloud. This creates a Hybrid IT environment and managing it completely is a hard row to hoe. “That’s why we developed NPM v12 to sweep aside the uncertainties of the cloud and let firms monitor every node, path, and network,” states Thompson. Recently added in SolarWinds’ arsenal, NPM v12 not only underpins the basic features of its parent solution, but incorporates two new components—NetPath and Network Insight. NetPath is a manually curated resource of human signal pathways that uses advanced probing to detect the network path from a source computer to a destination service. It allows for improved troubleshooting of delivery failures by automatically probing the network paths and mapping them to the related infrastructure. These paths include details on nodes and connections, often embracing multiple potential paths. In addition, the Network Insight tool is for F5 BIG-IP product monitoring intended to provide a comprehensive, single- console view of the F5 application delivery controller environment.
SolarWinds indicates that these powerful features of NPM will give IT professionals heightened network intelligence, such as dynamic and visual insight into the performance of applications and service delivery.
Taming Firms’ Networks
“What I enjoy is, putting the pieces of the puzzle together and creating a picture,” says Thompson. “And running a business is nothing less than solving a puzzle.” Recently, Thompson encountered a real technological maze.
A large U.S.-based healthcare organization with more than 6,000 servers and approximately 10,000 network devices spread across two data centers, 60 warehouses, and over 500 locations within the U.S., China, Pacific Rim, Canada, and Mexico had invested a multiple millions of dollars on IBM Tivoli to meet their monitoring and coverage needs. “But it still did not,” expresses the manager of enterprise monitoring, of the healthcare organization. Tivoli was very difficult to manage due to its architecture and limited capabilities. All hopes dashed with the existing solutions, the healthcare organization started looking for a foolproof solution that could reduce their overall IT management costs while, improving coverage. To bring in a new monitoring solution and replace the entire suite, the team approached SolarWinds.
Piloted by a full-throttled captain, Thompson, the SolarWinds’ team successfully replaced the Tivoli implementation with a single instance each of Network Performance Monitor and Server and Application Monitor along with six polling engines. The healthcare organization also expanded the scope of SolarWinds monitoring to include international locations and increased the device coverage. In less than 20 percent of the annual maintenance cost of Tivoli, SolarWinds significantly expanded the organization’s coverage to devices and monitoring capabilities.
Driving Businesses Forward
Organizations of all sizes, seeking an efficient network monitoring solution ride on SolarWinds’ coattails to eliminate the complexity that they have been forced to accept from traditional enterprise software vendors. “We compete with a bunch of very small vendors and the world’s largest vendors. We believe we have an advantage against all of them. Against the bigger vendors, we think our products are just better and much less expensive; typically 70-80 percent less. With the smaller vendors, we’re typically on par with their pricing, but we have much more technology, we scale much more effectively,” states Thompson. The company’s commitment to address the network analysis needs are met through products that are easy to buy, use and maintain, while providing the power to tackle any IT management problem on any scale.
Recently, SolarWinds successfully positioned itself in the Gartner Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics (NPMD) Magic Quadrant, which is reflective of the company’s commitment to eliminating the complexity that IT professionals face in their environment. By developing powerful solutions that address real-world problems out of the box with no professional services required, SolarWinds provides accessible and immediate value to help IT professionals reach their most-pressing network infrastructure health and performance goals that drive the business forward. “It’s a very different strategy than most software companies have because we are not trying to sell firms a solution. We’re trying to sell an individual set of tools that solve very specific problems that have IT professionals’ hair on fire right now, and at the same time, make it very easy for them to connect those individual products and solve larger connected problems when and if needed,” concludes Thompson.
