August 29, 2007

We recently conducted a survey of our Longitude customers with the help of third party industry experts Ptak, Noel and Associates, LLC. Respondents participated in either an online survey or a phone interview with a PNA analyst.

The findings were quite interesting but two main points really stood out. The first were the reasons why our customers chose Longitude and the second was the fact that proactive monitoring is still a top priority among IT professionals.

More than half of our responding customers said that they chose Longitude for its ease of use and cost-effectiveness. The customers were also asked about the time it took to deploy Longitude. Half of them said it took mere minutes and another quarter of our customers said it took only hours. Those are pretty significant statements about our product because they show how important some of our best features – quick deployment without the cost of individual agents – are to customers.

The survey also revealed that among the priorities of IT organizations, of top concern was the need to be proactive. About three-quarters of the respondents said that the inability to detect service problems within their organization was concerning because of the time spent trying to find problems after they occurred. But after deploying Longitude, most said that in less than one month they were able to find problems before they received user complaints and many of them actually saw those benefits within two weeks.

So what is this survey really telling us? In the words of one of our clients – an electronics manufacturing company – after deploying Longitude, “typical service issues that used to take days to resolve were now being cleared within hours,” saving them critical IT manpower and ultimately helping the bottom line. This clearly shows the need for, and advantages of, proactive monitoring. If our customers are telling us that our product is easy to use, cost-effective and can find problems before they affect business processes then I think we are meeting demands in the IT world. The survey illustrates that Longitude allows IT to focus on other things, like strategic organizational objectives, rather than on constantly finding and fixing problems after they’ve occurred. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

See the full results of our survey by visiting http://www.ptaknoelassociates.com/CSS/Heroix/index.html