My First Encounter with SolarWinds

I visited SolarWinds (Singapore) while I was in Singapore few days ago.

I have known Ms. Audrey Too (Marketing Manager) previously.

The office is located at Suntec City, Tower 2. It is a pretty nice place to be, with so many different companies camped there waiting to conquer the world, particularly the APAC region.

Ya, Singapore is very successful country, primarily it is able to attract investors from all over the world and hence it is considered to be the gateway to the APAC.

SolarWinds (Singapore) is no different, was first setup two years ago.

SolarWinds Incorporated was founded in 1999, during the early stage of Internet where all possibilities were possible.

Currently, its Regional Sales Director for APAC is Mr. Patrick McKinney.

The company's core products consist of:
  1. Orion - network performance monitoring (NPM) and application performance monitoring(APM) suite
  2. Profiler - storage performance and monitoring suite.
Network performance monitoring means monitoring by knowing all registered network-oriented devices about its status (up or down) which includes VM (virtual machines) devices.

With this, you can measure just everything that you want to measure such as bandwidth usage, latency, bottlenecks and etc.

And of course, you can do many tasks with the software such as creating reports, creating alerts, creating triggers and etc, just everything that one needs for monitoring,management,analysis and troubleshooting.

Application performance management is about monitoring for network connected devices' computing resources such as CPU utilization, memory utilization, up or down as well as the storage.

While APM is focusing on computing resources, the profiler is focusing on storage.

SolarWinds primarily focuses on selling its products to network engineers and system administrators. It is suitable for organizations of any sizes as long as you have network devices which include routers, PCs and even mobile devices.

What I am fascinated with the product is the core idea, which is to serve as a platform to integrate all sort of technologies together, to create some sort of console view of what is happening around your IT assets. Such technologies are SNMP, WMI, Netflow, IP SLA as well as other custom APIs.

In other words, the product is just able to work with any other network-oriented devices out there in the market, as long as it supports open standard technologies, known technologies or custom APIs.

Orion is selling at about USD 2,500. It is web based and supports Microsoft platform. Currently, it supports Windows Server 2003 onwards. The application is pretty much AJAX and CSS oriented, with simple GUI and caters for simplicity with the back-end as Microsoft .NET technologies.

Mr. Henry Pea (Sales Engineer) told me that the secret of success is Thwack.com; a community knowledgebased web site for its customers and the general public. Thwack.com provides us with forums, blogs and knowledgebase.

Through Thwack.com, not only customers get to have technical supports, they also gain access to other know-hows and tips. Besides that, this is the platform for product innovations where customers get to request for new features while critics get to challenge product innovations.

Having Thwack.com is what I call it the 'closed circuit product development strategy' where every issues will be able to get known and resolved eventually; nothing is left in the dark.

Another culture that I like about SolarWinds is the free tools provided. Each free tool is actually a module of the Orion suite with some limitations. Orion suite simply combines everything together. And one can utilize such tools to solve many technical issues arising daily.

“SolarWinds (Singapore) is one of the fastest rising companies in Singapore and we see tremendous opportunity for SolarWinds in the APAC region. With the recent addition of the Brisbane office as the APAC Headquarters, we intend to continue the expansion of our presence in APAC in 2011 especially in countries like Australia, Singapore and China.”

For Malaysia, existing customers include Green Packet P1.

SolarWinds encourages companies to monitor all network oriented devices, to maximize investments and productivity. It is always better to have more visibility.

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