Network Management

Marina Gil-Santamaria, director of product marketing for IPswitch's "WhatsUp gold" product line, was interviewed recently by TMCnet web editor Marisa Torrieri to discuss one of the most important concerns faced by service providers and enterprises today - network management.

WhatsUp Gold, the company's offering, is described by Gil-Santamaria as a "complete IT management product, simple to install and easy to use. It lets you discover and manage your network, your servers, applications, virtual resources, network traffic and other resources."

She noted that Ipswitch (News - Alert) has been in the market for 19 years, and "that means that What's Up Gold has been tried, tested and proven on a network just like yours - over 100,000 of them, actually."

The product comes "basically in four flavors," Gil-Santamaria explained. "The first one is WhatsUp Gold Standard, which is our entry-level network monitoring and management tool for SMBs."

Then there's Premium, which incorporates system and application management, and Distributed, which is scalable enterprise management for larger organizations with multiple locations. Finally, she said, they offer MSB, which is the "right product for managed service providers who want to deliver high quality network system and application management to their end customers."

Torrieri observed that the product is built on a modulated yet integrated architecture, and can scale with various infrastructures. Gil-Santamaria explained that this is important because "infrastructures have become very complex, and every organization is a different size and has different management strategies and goals in place."

This means, she said, that "one offering doesn't fit all. That's why we offer a set of integrated plug-ins, so you can build the product that is right for you."

Gil-Santamaria noted that one of their most popular plug-ins is WhatsUp Connected, their layered discovery tool, "so you can discover and map everything that's connected to your network."