Ipswitch’s (News - Alert) Network Management Division, a provider of IT management solutions, announced that LodgeNet Interactive, a provider of media and connectivity solutions to the hospitality industry, has selected Ipswitch’s WhatsUp Gold to manage a network of 1,300 hotels across the United States and Canada.
With WhatsUp Gold, LodgeNet could improve network reliability and guest service, company officials stated. The solution also reduces operational costs and thus enables easy deployment of new technologies.
“In hospitality technology, we live or die by network uptime,” Steve Pofahl, senior vice president, GM Broadband Solutions for LodgeNet Interactive, said. “LodgeNet delivers TV, Internet, voice and other in-room technologies to hotels and their guests. Our job is to make these services easy, fast, stable and supportable 24x7.”
Pofahl continued, “With a network spanning all of the U.S. and Canada, it’s a gargantuan task. Using WhatsUp Gold, we went from zero-standard, manual monitoring of our broadband network to real-time automated monitoring of the entire network in just two weeks.”
The solution includes both WhatsUp Gold and WhatsConnected. It is a layer 2 and layer 3 network discoveries plug-in which enables LodgeNet to quickly poll and discover tens of thousands of devices and hundreds of thousands of network interfaces across its complex, continent-wide network, the company said.
WhatsUp Gold helps LodgeNet customer service representatives immediately check and take action on network-related inquiries from a remote location. With the help of this service they can quickly respond to technical questions from guests or hotel managers.
The solution offers proactive support to prevent network problems before they occur. This allows LodgeNet to contact hotels to offer preventive maintenance.
In the recent five-month period, the company noted that 97 percent of 1500 network anomalies were fixed before the customer called with a problem.
The high network reliability offered by WhatsUp Gold enables LodgeNet to implement new, innovative technologies so that hotels can offer their guests leading-edge communications and entertainment such as HDTV, streaming Video on Demand and Voice over IP (VoIP).
Pofahl said, “LodgeNet’s goal is to be able to tell them their network is healthy, and their customers are taken care of. That’s what counts in the hospitality industry, and that’s what we deliver thanks to WhatsUp Gold.”
TMCnet recently reported that Ipswitch achieved over 5,000 downloads of its WhatsUp Gold Engineer’s Toolkit in the first month of its release. Launched on 29th June 2010, the toolkit helps monitor, diagnose and troubleshoot a vast majority of common network engineering tasks including design, and planning, discovery, diagnostics, DNS verification, remote control, configuration and credentials management.
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