Blog of Roger Greene, CEO

I think it is easy to settle for stereotypes, particularly about the distant past. Take Victorian England. For me – I admit I am not up on my history – what comes to mind is proper, class-oriented, risk-averse. Thank goodness for curious writers like Bill Bryson, who unveils the richer fabric behind the stereotype in At Home.

In 1850 Britain decided to construct the world’s largest building to house a World’s Fair-like exhibition. It would span nineteen acres and be spacious enough to contain four St. Paul’s cathedrals. Two major problems were that nothing so large had ever been built, and following several wasted months, there was less than a year to get it done. All initial designs had been rejected.  The second committee came up with an unworkable design. Then they heard from Joseph Paxton, a gardener from a poor family. He had designed the world’s first municipal park, which Olmstead used as a model for New York’s Central Park.

Paxton came up with the idea while chairing a railroad committee meeting and finished the design in two weeks. The core materials were iron and glass, never before used for a large building. Also acres of wood flooring, against the rules for fire safety reasons. Despite all this, after just a couple of days of deliberation, the committee approved Paxton’s design. Then Paxton designed a mobile platform that allowed workers to install 18,000 panes of glass a week. And then another machine that a small team could use to attach 20 miles of guttering at a rate of 2,000 feet per day. All in 1850!

The building was finished in 35 weeks. 1,851 feet long, 408 feet wide, 110 feet high. The cost? 80,000 pounds. The exhibition was  a success.

Paxton’s genius, while remarkable, is not why I write this. Nor is it about Henry Cole, who dreamed up the exhibition, nor Prince Albert, who sponsored it. Nor is my main point the committee, which had the courage and the open-mindedness to support a radical idea from an unconventional source and commission a gardener to design the largest building the world had ever seen. The true wonder is Victorian England and its support for extraordinary ideas, for innovation and for risk-taking. That is the kind of culture I want at Ipswitch.

Two weeks ago we launched WhatsUp Gold v15. I am particularly proud of this release because of its emphasis on user experience. Too often there is an inertia with product releases, where checklists rule the day. How many features have been added? How long is the list? Features are essential – networks evolve and grow more complex, requiring more sophisticated tools. But over the years, accumulated features can become an impenetrable thicket. We know we have strayed too far in that direction when customers call us to request a feature, only to learn that said feature has been in the product for several releases. With WhatsUp Gold v15, the Network Management team decided to return to our roots in a big way by putting the emphasis on user experience. We dedicated a team to reassessing the entire WhatsUp Gold user interface. The resulting v15 simplifies tasks (fewer clicks), is more intuitive, and integrates WhatsUp Gold’s plug-in modules with the core WhatsUp Gold user interface. I like the way it works and the way it looks. Form and function together, now that’s nice.

What a thrill and honor to attend the Best Places to Work awards ceremony last Thursday, hosted by the Boston Business Journal at the Boston Convention Center. The awards were based on employee surveys. There were 25 awards each for large, mid-sized and small companies. In the mid-sized category, we came in second!

Whew! What a weekend! All Ipswitch employees plus guests just returned from an extraordinary few days celebrating our 20th anniversary at the Breakers Hotel in West Palm Beach.

I find it hard to comprehend that it has been 20 years. I feel great pride at what we have accomplished, and more than that, at the strengths we have built in our teams, our products, our brands, our relationships with customers, partners and vendors; our systems and processes. Because of these strengths, never before have we had such exceptional opportunity. We celebrate the past and look forward with excitement to the future.

I find it difficult to get a handle on cloud services from reading vendor marketing materials. I want to learn how organizations set up cloud services, what they really think, and just how much they are willing to rely on them. Amazon Web Services’s recent 3-day disruption in service led to some soul searching by those affected. One was Doug Kaye of the Conversations Network. I admire Doug’s passion for and success at making conference talks available to a broad audience. I find him refreshingly candid. Doug gives a thorough assessment of what happened and what they learned from the experience. He also links to another straightforward analysis by SmugMug’s Don MacAskill. I think anyone considering web services will benefit from reading both of these posts.

There is something about teamwork leading to a big success that really makes me proud of our staff. Our recent move to a new office in Lexington is an example.

Personal attention for servers

We hadn’t moved in about seven years, during which we grew quite a bit. We now have a complex set of interrelated systems, so mapping out the move was no easy task! IT and Operations did extensive planning so we would have minimal disruption.

Measure twice, cut once

In preparation, IT continued our transition to the cloud and to a co-lo facility for public facing servers. For months they cajoled, prodded and pleaded with the telephone companies to be ready to transition our Internet link. They mapped out the cabling in our new office.

Keith setting up wireless

They developed a precise plan to ensure absolute minimum downtime, and did extensive testing to make sure we would have no glitches, but could recover quickly in case we did.

And they had superb support from Operations, who coordinated an extraordinary range of activities, vendors and staff.

Steve led an IT team of five people. When the move day – Friday – arrived, they started as late as they could to give Sales and Technical Support maximum access to systems for the day. By midnight our team had  systems up and running at the new office and had confirmed no data was lost. Then they had a full day of testing on Saturday. For individual users, on Sunday the the entire IT team volunteered to go to each desk to test network and phone access so users would get exactly same environment they were used to when they arrived on Monday.

Melissa managed everything to do with the physical side side of the move, including coordinating with our landlords and finding the movers. Thanks!

In IT, thanks to Keith, Jim, John from Madison, Aftab, Eric, Mike S. from Augusta and all of the other volunteers, with leadership and support from Steve and Mike M.

An exhausting move weekend, after months of preparation. And the result was stellar. When people arrived on Monday, all systems were working, and the transition to our new office was smooth.

Melissa managed the move

As if this wasn’t enough, a week later we moved our Livonia, Michigan office. Many of the same team flew out to manage the move, and that one went smoothly as well.

Two weeks, two flawless moves. Thanks, team! You make me proud.

This morning a terrible earthquake hit Japan, the worst ever recorded. Following the quake, tsunamis struck the Japanese coast and headed for Hawaii and other areas. Our thoughts and prayers are with our employees, customers and partners in Japan, as well as all of the people of Japan and other areas  affected by the tsunamis.

Sky Car, 1979 / Felhőautó by Geoff Hendricks

The cloud has been a source of inspiration for many years. (Here my uncle poses in a car from his cloud period. He once rented a billboard in New York to paint clouds on it. The space was cheap because it faced the wrong way on a street recently made one way. I bet it made pedestrians smile.)

These days, it is hard to tell how much of the cloud is transformational and how much is hype. The media and investors are always looking for the next big thing, and are thus inclined to extol the promise of new technologies. As a software company, we have to predict whether and how quickly new ideas will be adopted. (Anyone remember the perennially proclaimed “Year of the LAN” in the 80′s?) Make the wrong bet, and either miss a market shift or waste years of development. Microsoft and other vendors are always touting the latest technology  ‘revolution’. If you adopt all, you consume all of your resources and get nowhere. So we have passed on some technologies. One was client-side Java, which never lived up to its cross-platform, common-UI promise. It turned out to be a lowest-common-denominator approach that could be beat in both speed and elegance by single-platform development. It has an important role today, especially for server and mobile applications, but still has not achieved cross-platform prominence.

The cloud for our markets, we believe, is real. It is a well-known success for some applications like CRM – witness SalesForce.com. But our customers face different issues. For WhatsUp Gold to monitor devices and applications, our software needs access to customers’ networks. Not something many customers so far want to trust to an external application. For WS_FTP, MOVEit and Messageway, we are guardians of an organization’s most sensitive data. Where data resides and how it is protected are of critical importance. How network management and secure file transfer applications are made available via the cloud is about much more than hosting an important application. We must determine what customers are comfortable with, while recognizing that this will constantly change. Our plan is to keep talking to our customers about their plans and offer them a choice of shrink-wrap or cloud applications, plus software and services to manage the cloud. Today, we offer MOVEit DMZ as a hosted service and are talking about using file transfer to govern and manage cloud services.  We also have a hosted offering for IMail Server. We are convinced the cloud is real for our markets. We will release more cloud-based products and services. But we will let the market decide the timing, pace and extent of the transition.