It's all down to network performance: Fluke Networks

IT departments in Asia are grappling with three major challenges, says Fluke Networks: more demanding users, decisions on tech made for business reasons, and the need to manage consolidated networking and application infrastructure.

Source: Fluke Networks. Roberts.

“End-user experience is becoming a focal point for IT because it is the new litmus test as to whether or not the ‘network’ is working properly,” explained Doug Roberts, MD Product Strategy, Fluke Networks. “Users in general are more ‘tech’ savvy than ever before so they begin to expect the exact same level of performance (responsiveness) from their corporate applications as they do from their recreational apps.”

The key is that performance can now be tangibly tied to the top and bottom lines of any organisation, Roberts pointed out. “To keep the business running smoothly, the performance of both applications and the network must be maintained at the highest levels. Maintaining a high performance network will enable Asian companies to compete effectively in the global markets both in terms of driving customer-facing applications and maintaining an efficient backend operations,” he said.

At the same time, Fluke Networks has seen a fundamental shift in decision making whereby IT decisions are being made at the business level as opposed to the traditional IT departmental level. “Whether it be a line-of-business owner or the CEO, decisions to move to the cloud, co-locate services and virtualise infrastructure are becoming ledger decisions aimed at streamlining IT and increasing efficiencies, thus increasing profits and allowing for more rapid expansion of services offered,” Roberts observed.

The most successful CIOs are reinventing themselves. “Progressive CIOs are taking this opportunity to drive higher prioritisation and funding for strategic IT projects at the C-suite level,” said Roberts. “Some IT-driven revenue-generation tactics include big data (which enables targeted marketing and effective loyalty programmes), sales and marketing automation, and good old e-commerce with a focus on enhancing end-user experience and driving proactive purchase suggestions.”

A third challenge is the convergence of network and application infrastructures. “It began with the virtualisation revolution and continues today as we see more and more consolidated platforms being introduced to the market that incorporate the routing, server, and application components into a single integrated platform,” said Roberts. 

“While it’s great from a revenue perspective, this convergence for enterprise and carrier customers has created a new challenge for IT support – the need for clear visibility on problem parts of the infrastructure during a large scale event. This is precisely the problem that Fluke Networks aims to solve.”

Fluke Networks’ solutions enable network personnel to continuously monitor the performance of their networks to improve overall end-user experience and prevent network downtime, as well as identify the root cause of issues if and when network outages occur. Its Visual TruView, for instance, provides visibility into complex integrated infrastructures and pinpoints problems down to the component level whether they are physical or virtual.