Planes, Trains, and Automobiles with PathSolutions CTO, Tim Titus: Taking Total Network Visibility on the Road
The 42nd Annual ACUTA Conference and Exhibition is from April 14 through 17 and I will be heading to the conference venue in San Diego this weekend. ACUTA is the acronym for The Association for Information Communications Technology Professionals in Higher Education. It represents over 1900 individuals at about 700 institutions of higher education. Its members range from smaller schools and community colleges to the 50 largest U.S. institutions. Needless to say, that’s quite a mix!
The challenges that ACUTA attendees face are quite similar to those that attended BrainStorm 14.0: ensuring a stable network within strict budgetary and resource guidelines. Of course, educational institutions are not immune to the added stress that the proliferation of digital devices and academic and administrative applications can have on a network infrastructure. On campuses today a network slowdown, or outage, can disrupt student information systems, email, class schedules, campus news, and many other administrative processes. More than ever, a reliable network is the key to preventing this from happening.
Over the years, we’ve helped many educational institutions keep their communications and processes running smoothly. One thing most of those customers have in common is too few resources and, as a result, not enough time to dedicate to troubleshooting network issues. After our solution is installed and deployed (in less than 12 minutes on any size network and I tend to say this a lot because there’s no other performance management solution on the market that can do this), the most consistent feedback we get is that the network team spends far less time troubleshooting. And of course, that saved time can be used to support an always growing infrastructure and all the processes that run on top of it.
But don’t just take my word for it. Here’s what Chad Evans, a Systems Architect at Wenatchee Valley College, had to say:
“We recently went from 12 in my department down to 7. In order to give the same level of service, we depend on PathSolutions because it does most of the network performance management heavy lifting. For example, one report I use automatically identifies duplex mismatches which is a very common and very time consuming problem to troubleshoot. These issues can be addressed in minutes. Before, it might be days or weeks before those issues came to my attention. I often find that we will fix network issues before we even get a help desk notification. PathSolutions enables me to discover anything out of the ordinary that is happening on our network and address it before it causes a bigger problem.”
If you’re going to ACUTA, please stop by our booth, 103, and say hello. We’d be happy to show you how (as Chad says) to identify anything out of the ordinary that is happening on your network. If you’re not attending but want to learn more about our solutions, a great place to start would be with this blog. You might also be interested in watching a number of presentations and videos located on our Resource Center page.
Until next time!
