By Cat Yong
NetGain Systems comes to the IT monitoring market, to help its customers reduce, if not prevent, IT downtime and improve IT infrastructure performance, said its founder and CEO, Toh Soon Seah.
With a core development team that has expertise in the telco space and experience with operation support systems (OSS), NetGain Systems brought its core network management know-how to the enterprise space 12 years ago, and has since grown from strength to strength.
But Toh admitted, “Network is our bread and butter. But we are looking at a bigger scope which is Information Technology (IT). Network is usually not the biggest issue. There is still storage, server, virtualisation, applications and more.
“Our solution can stand in the market because we look at the whole infrastructure holistically, not just networks and switches, but everything that the IT department owns.”
This holistic view of an organisation’s IT assets and resources allows NetGain’s monitoring tools and services to track performance, detect faults and alert the relevant IT personnel.
The intelligence which they gather is also valuable in helping IT departments fine tune, improve and do capacity planning over time, so there is no wastage of resources.
“Our tools provide an automated way to do this, so that an organisations’ IT staff can focus on more value-added tasks,” emphasised Toh.
He had also shared that they work with customers to build more and more automation on top of their monitoring tools.
“IT managers are in for a more difficult time, as infrastructure is only going to get more complex and expectations are going to get higher.
“Soon, downtime won’t just be a concern for the IT manager, but also CIOs, CMOs, CFOs and the whole organisation. Everyone in the organisation would worry about down time, because it directly impacts revenue and customer loyalty.”
Also, as the much-touted business and productivity driver, the Internet of Things becomes a little more real over time, manageability of the it all, becomes a real concern as well.
Toh opined, “Internet of Things is definitely happening and the way to go forward for us, is to understand in a deeper sense, how to evolve the company to (manage) it.”
First line of defense
NetGain Systems wants to position itself as the first line of defense that IT managers can count on.
Toh explained, “They have to take care of networks, storage, servers, database, applications…There are so many technologies with system integrators, vendors, partners to support the various technologies.
“But the job to make sure everything fits together and works together is still the IT team’s.”
The company wants position themselves on the customer side as looking at everything holistically, so that from a single management console, customers can correlate everything that is happening in their IT environment.
“An IT manager has to look at the health of different components to determine the root cause of an issue. With our solutions, you can actually trace it down quickly to the root cause,” Toh described.
Wear and tear will always happen, downtime can’t really be prevented, and Toh observed that realistically IT managers know outages are happening every day all around the world. Not only that, but down times or non-availability times are also increasing.
“It’s not because hardware or software is getting faultier. The bigger issue is that too much time, as much as 90 percent, is being spent on trying to find the problem.
The key is a quick time-to-resolution, and to solve issues in 5 seconds versus one hour.
“That is our objective – to shorten this time as much as possible,” said Toh.
Real guts value
Toh views that many industries besides just telecommunications, have systems that are mission-critical these days.
“We have worked with finance institutions. For example online trading that does transactions per minute, needs to have mission critical systems. We also have a utility customer in Southern China that we help ensure electricity is managed and deliver securely to other industries like healthcare and manufacturing,” Toh illustrated.
But of all the examples he gave, perhaps none demonstrated the company’s scalability, customisability and flexibility as well as being the sole provider of IT monitoring solutions to the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
“It involved the biggest IT infrastructure I have ever seen!” Toh exclaimed.
The 17-day event with 300 separate sporting events, had to monitor 15,000 devices over 51 locations that were powered by 900 servers in 17 data centres with 1500 data network switches and routers.
“It was an important milestone for us to beat the big boys like CA, BMC, IBM, HP.”
Toh also shared that when planning for the 2008 Games, IT infrastructure was one of the last few things to be planned and executed, but NetGain Systems had stuck it out and worked closely with the organisers throughout the whole time.
Unique devices like Omega’s time keeping equipment also had to be monitored and catered to, and Toh believes their customisation ability, coupled with their flexibility and quick deployment was why they won against bigger competitors and their standard, off-the-shelf solutions.
Another customer that Toh considered a feather in their cap is the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC).
“They are a long time customer of around 9 years and we monitor their over 3000 servers spread over different locations in China.
“They have been with us since our solution was version 1 till now version 8.
“There must be something we are doing right that they are sticking with us throughout the years!” Toh stated.
Unique advantages
NetGain Systems’s experience in the telco domain made them realise how expensive and complex it is to tailor make solutions for customers.
As a result they have a product architecture that is extensible, and which is able to evolve really quickly along with customers needs.
“We can do a lot of things on the customers’ site, and tailor make solutions to fit customers, without having to come back and do R&D.”
This extensible architecture together with local presences in target markets so that they are able to the job that is required, has served them well.
‘Over time, customers have come to appreciate this architecture and this service support philosophy from NetGain Systems,” said Toh.
The potential market
The CEO views China along with Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia to be its top markets.
NetGain Systems had made inroads into China from very early on and now works with around 500 customers from a wide range of industries, but Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia are up and coming economies with a vacuum to be filled in the IT monitoring space, according to Toh.
Toh explained, “We are setting up local teams, with a core team still in Singapore. Just to extend to nearby countries, we can still commit to the same kind of deliverables that makes us so successful.”
For now at least, they are very focused, and other markets aren’t even in their view unless they can replicate what they do best, in those markets as well.
