With business on the hunt for ways to reduce spending, Entuity's Klapproth discusses where SMBs are putting their scarce dollars, what investments will reap rewards, and the risks of jumping into open source too quickly.
Since its founding in 1997, Entuity has focused on providing network management systems to small and midsize companies. The company delivered its first product in 2000 and today, Entuity's Eye of the Storm network management suite continues helping companies manage and control their networks. Recently, Kenneth Klapproth, VP of marketing for Entuity, spoke with bMighty columnist and blogger Paul Korzeniowski about the network management market.
bMighty: How would you position your company in the marketplace?
Kenneth Klapproth: We have tried to deliver all of the functionality needed to optimally manage a small and medium business' network rather than be diverted with all of the extras. We deliver network inventory, topology, connectivity, device performance, network performance, and fault modules. In comparison, framework companies try to do it all: networks, applications, performance, unified communications. We focus only network management.
bMighty: How have you tried to differentiate your product from other vendors in the market?
Klapproth: Our latest push has been Green IT, which focuses on power consumption by network equipment. To date when it comes to power consumption, many vendors' focus has been limited to servers and data centers. We have found that there is an opportunity to cut energy costs by monitoring other devices that a network manager usually doesn't have an eye on, such as switches and user workstations. Our product includes information about the network infrastructure, so companies can make well-informed capacity planning decisions. With Green IT, companies know what devices are on their networks and what is powered on. The system provides reports about power consumption to allow managers to suggest or encourage better power utilization policies in their corporations.
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bMighty: How much of a handle do businesses now have on their energy use?
Klapproth: In general, not very much. About every five years, companies take a bottom-up view of their networks and redesign them, so they're efficient. However, in the interim, the network expands as additional capacity is needed. Small and medium businesses throw in a switch here, a router there, or a wireless device in another location. Companies end up with a wide range of power hungry devices, some newer and more power sensitive and others that are older and less power sensitive. They can then use our tools to see how much power is used by each device, how much power is used per port, and how many spare ports are available. They can slice, dice, and report on their usage in different ways. Then they can determine if a device should be retired or the ports on one transferred to second and then retired. Another option is to identify which devices (the most power-hungry ones) the company wants to replace at its next opportunity.
bMighty: How is the economy changing how small and midsize companies buy network management products?
Klapproth: Our product is designed to help companies operate better and save money. When times get tough, folks look to save, so we're still making the cut and business has been good. However, the length of the needed time to close a deal is increasing: It's adding another three months or so on to the sales cycle.
bMighty: How are small and midsize businesses management staffs evolving in these difficult economic times?
Klapproth: As companies downsize, traditional silos (help desk, operations center, network manager) are being consolidated. Regardless of which group wins, the employees left behind are being asked to do more with less. However, these individuals may not have the same level of expertise in areas like network management that the employees who left had, so companies need tools that are simple and can generate necessary analytic data easily. They're looking for tools that view management information as the customer's data and make it available to anyone who wants to use it. They don't want that pertinent information to be trapped inside a management system.
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bMighty: What do you view as the reasons why small and midsize businesses have been interested in open source systems?
Klapproth: Open source tools can be great in some cases. The buying price (free) makes them alluring to companies; however, these products are not free to use. Companies pay to gain the integration and insight needed to use such products effectively. These tools are often not equipped to manage contemporary issues of the day, such as wireless systems and virtualization. If a company is using an open source system and wants to look into its virtual environment and examine its virtual machines, does it add another tool and try to integrate them by reporting? In commercial systems, the vendor develops and includes such items. Open source systems deliver a specific type of functionality, but eventually small and medium businesses reach the stage where they want something that is better integrated and prevents them from having to piece everything all together themselves. In addition, businesses don't want to worry about the versioning issues involved with open source products.
See columns by Paul Korzeniowski.
Paul Korzeniowski is a Sudbury, Mass.-based freelance writer who has been writing about networking issues for two decades. His work has appeared in Business 2.0, Entrepreneur, Investor's Business Daily, Newsweek, and InformationWeek.
