Guy Bryant and InterMapper on the Same Career Path
Customer: Guy Bryant
Current Position: Project Director, Alcatel
Past Positions: Optus Vision, consultant IBM, Program Executive (Sydney 2000 Olympic Games support) Infomedia Ltd, consultant
He's Used InterMapper: At all of the above
Quote: “InterMapper is so cost-effective. You don't need $40,000 worth of software, $60,000 worth of hardware, and a $100,000 per year person to run it.”
Guy Bryant started using InterMapper in 1996. InterMapper had been developed for internal use by Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH but the college, having noted its utility in a wide variety of network settings, was beginning to test its commercial viability. It wasn't until 2000 that Dartware spun off from the college to continue product and market development.
All this makes Guy Bryant a very early adopter. Since 1996, Bryant has relied on InterMapper to monitor mission critical networks in four organizations.
Optus Vision
Bryant first used InterMapper while working as a consultant at Optus Vision, an Australian telecommunications company that delivered broadband, data, video, and telephony services. He was responsible for rolling out the company's infrastructure.
Of course, telecom services are expected to be up and running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. As a major service provider, Optus Vision had many sites to manage and monitor. If there was a problem, Bryant and his team had to know where and what it was…fast.
Optus Vision was an all Macintosh organization so Bryant found his way to InterMapper which was originally developed to run on a Mac. (InterMapper now supports Macintosh, Windows, UNIX, and Linux platforms.) He used it to monitor operations across 32 sites. He set InterMapper to send pager alerts to note poor network performance. “InterMapper was exceptionally easy and cost-effective. It still is.”
IBM, IT service provider for the International Olympic Committee, Sydney 2000 Olympic Games
Like all Olympic Games, those held in Sydney, Australia in 2000 were a huge undertaking. Bryant was asked to join IBM as Program Executive and lead the team that would provide ICT services (including data network services) to 48 non-Games venues and 4 Games venues, including the across-Australia torch relay. All the venues required highly reliable network operations to support communications and data transfers. The torch relay team, for example, needed to conduct nightly data uploads and downloads (schedules etc.) over a variety of connection types depending on where they were – a city or the middle of the Outback.
The first day Bryant and his team moved their central operations into a new building, the network began to have trouble. When everyone arrived in the morning and logged in, the network failed. “I needed something quickly to get me out of a deep pond. I called Dartware.”
Bryant had InterMapper up and running in 2 hours and immediately noted a choke point on an ATM switch. With the “total view” InterMapper provided, his team was able to diagnose, isolate, and remediate the problem in 6 minutes. That was a vast improvement over the previous fixes which had taken 6 hours.
InterMapper's catch prompted an architecture design review and the problem was fixed once and for all.
InfoMedia
InfoMedia supports automotive dealers across Australia. Its internet-based Dealer Management Systems provide services to dealers; managing and running all aspects of financial data systems (sales, pricing, service, etc.) at a reduced cost. When Bryant was Director of Technology at InfoMedia, he supported 250 sites with Cisco routers, VPN, and the internet.
Already an InterMapper power user, Bryant relied on the software once again – this time to monitor central office and dealer networks and the connections between them. Top level maps showed dealership locations while submaps detailed dealer networks. With the convergence of VoIP, Bryant could also monitor PBXs for quality of service via pinging and custom probes.
“We could see when dealerships were getting viruses,” reported Bryant. “You don't really think of InterMapper as a virus detection tool but you see that bandwidth is steadily increasing in a way that bucks the trend, you can be pretty sure there's a virus involved.”
Bryant's team used an LCD projector to display InterMapper maps on the wall of their office making sure that they could always see how things were, or weren't, working. And if they missed something on the map, alerts were used extensively.
Though Bryant has left InfoMedia, InterMapper remains in place used, coincidently, by a former member of his IBM Olympic team.
Alcatel
Now, as Project Director, Mobile/Fixed Systems Division, at Alcatel Australia, Bryant leads a team of developers and support staff performing the installations of systems and integration into the telco's voice networks. Bryant's Alcatel team for MSD.FSD is especially focused on intelligent network (IN) services that allow subscribers to locate businesses, restaurants, hotels, etc. via their cell phone. Those services handle hundreds of millions of pre-paid and post-paid mobile calls each day (For example, a fixed line subscriber might call a generic Pizza Hut phone number. The IN, using business rules and the caller's phone number to set a location, routes the call to the user's nearest Pizza Hut.
Alcatel systems handle all the call and data processing through TCP/IP once it is handed over from the telco switch's SS7 link (E1/T1). Bryant uses InterMapper to conduct health checks of those systems. In addition to pointing out performance problems, InterMapper data helps Bryant plan for capacity increases.
Bryant has recently purchased InterMapper Remote so that he can access customer sites from his central operation desk. “We'll be able to see just what we want through the firewall without having to introduce anything new at customer sites. Our customers are excited about this value-added service.”
Obviously, Bryant is pleased with InterMapper. “InterMapper is such a great value. The difference in cost between it and a management system like OpenView is phenomenal. I've been able to roll out InterMapper for $5,000 - $7,000 Aussie as opposed to $80,000 - $250,000. And InterMapper reflects network configuration changes in minutes as opposed to weeks.”