October 19, 2007

Many of our Longitude customers support clients conducting e-commerce business. IT groups at these companies face serious pressure to keep networks and applications running at peak efficiency. If problems arise it can mean less than acceptable service levels and subsequently the loss of significant revenue for their clients. They turn to Longitude’s application performance and network monitoring to help them avoid these issues.

We recently spent some time talking with one our clients supporting e-commerce customers, Hanover Direct. They shared with us the ways in which Longitude helps them achieve optimal business performance. Hanover Direct is a provider of quality, branded merchandise through a portfolio of catalogs and e-commerce platforms and their clients include Domestications, The Company Store, and Company Kids, whose e-commerce sites receive more than eight million web site hits per day.

According to systems administrator, Jason Valli, his IT group needs to make sure that their IT infrastructure can meet changing user volumes and transaction requirements. Heroix Longitude’s customized real-time dashboards, reports, alerts, user experience monitoring, and SLA capabilities enable them to consistently have a clear view of how systems are functioning. They can fix issues quickly should they occur and in many cases are able to avoid problems before they ever affect business.

Valli told us that with Longitude they no longer have to wade through reams of event data to understand what is happening if an issue does arise. He said “We have automated the mundane tasks affiliated with monitoring our web servers, disk space, CPU utilization, events, and trend reporting and can at any point identify what is happening throughout our IT environment. We now have constant access to the intelligence necessary to easily isolate the root source of the problems.”

Without the worry of network or application issues affecting their customers’ business, Hanover Direct can assure that their clients don’t lose money due to network or system downtime. This allows them to confidently provide the highest quality IT service to their clients. Heroix is proud to help them provide this level of service.

Posted by Rick Lane, President

August 7, 2007

Longitude was recently named as a winner of the “Editor’s Best Awards” in the interoperability category by Penton Media’s Windows IT Pro® magazine.

According to their group publisher, Kim Paulsen:

“The 2007 Editor’s Best Awards utilize our editors’ product knowledge… to identify exceptional products that have been covered in the pages of Windows IT Pro. Our editors demand solid value and performance from the products they select.”

I am very proud of this award and, in my opinion, we do deliver the “solid value and performance” that the Windows IT Pro editors are looking for. We constantly deliver this because we invite feedback from our customers and listen to what they want. With each release of our product, we add features and monitoring capabilities based on what our customers say they need.

For example, with the recent launch of Longitude V5 we were able to add several new features, including VMware capabilities and synthetic web transactions. In today’s environment of lean IT staff and tight budgets, many of our clients need to run on virtual systems. The ability to monitor VMware enables them to consolidate resources while allowing them to be aware of any strain on the host machines. And with synthetic web transactions, our customers can test how users are interacting with their web-based applications. This enables them to relate issues with web applications, such as e-commerce functions, to the underlying infrastructure components that may be causing problems. And thus it ensures that critical business needs are being met without tying up precious IT staff time.

But these are just two examples of application performance and network monitoring capabilities that were a direct response to the growing demands of our customers. The increasing challenges that IT organizations face, along with the growing demands that businesses place on their IT staff, are what drive us to continually expand our value with each subsequent release.

I encourage you to post comments about what features would add value to your organization and would help you accomplish your business objectives.

Posted by Rick Lane, Heroix President