Solar Winds finally blows into Europe
Hey, we love you guys.
By Maxwell Cooter | Techworld | Published: 11:05, 09 October 2007
Network management company Solar Winds has finally launched in Europe, eight years after it was founded.
The company has opened an office in Cork and is recruiting channel partners to boost European sales.
At the same time, Solar Winds has some additions to its set of free network management tools: NetFlow Configurator, which the company claimed was the first and only free remote configuration utility for Cisco NetFlow, an updated SolarWinds TFTP Server v9.1, and an updated SolarWinds Advanced Subnet Calculator v 9.1.
The company also claimed its millionth download for its free tools.
The company has made a name for itself as a company driven by engineers with web-based sales but according to Kenny Van Zant, chief product strategist for Solar Winds, that’s no longer sufficient in Europe. “Only about 20 percent of our sales are outside the US, yet the market in EMEA is the same size. We’ve definitely missed out by not having a European presence,” he said.
Van Zant said that its high-end product Orion competed with the likes of HP, IBM and CA in the systems management sector. “To compete with these tools, we’ve made our product simple to use. Users can download a fully-functioning trial version of the software and have it up-and-running and fully configured within hours - with some of the larger companies, that process takes weeks.”
He claimed that many of Solar Winds customers had abandoned the well-established players in favour of Orion. “Many of them have spent thousands and thousands of dollars on the software and don’t want to rip it out. They install our software in parallel and compare the two. We find we win out when the maintenance contract is up,” he said.
