Leader or Spectator?
In 1980 I became the Project Manager for an initiative that I had dreamed up
a few years earlier and couldn't get my former Employer interested in - Remote Diagnostics. In the 21st Century, remotely
monitoring and fixing computer systems is a no-brainer. Not so in the late
1970's. Common wisdom at the time was that Customers would not stand for
"electronic intrusions" into their domain and that even if they would,
fixing problems required the on site presence of a highly skilled, well paid
Field Engineer wearing a 3 piece suit. It was with a fair amount of risk to
my career and future employment
that I flew against the wind trying to obtain even meager funding for this
project. Suffice it to say that many Management dinosaurs of the day were not
exactly supportive of radical, new concepts. The last thing they
wanted was some thirty-something Engineer coming along to change the way
that they had been doing things for decades.
Of course time stands still for no man or tunnel-visioned Manager and the
rest is history. I spent the 1980s
building "Remote Diagnostic Centers" at my next two jobs. By the late '80s,
remotely diagnosing and fixing computers had become a well established and
cost effective methodology
that was pretty much globally accepted by customers and senior Field Engineering
management alike.
 It seems clunky now but at the time, 300 baud accoustic couplers
were the norm and 1200 baud modems like the one pictured were blazingly fast
(and expensive!).
There was no Internet and Ethernet had just been invented. Networks were mostly
point-to-point. Commercial UNIX, DNS and e-mail wouldn't come along for years to
come. Disk drives
were still a new technology and a 100 meg drive was the size of a washing machine. Phone service
was still pretty bad in Europe and even worse in Asia so maintaining a connection at even 1200 baud
was iffy. But even 300 baud was faster (and cheaper) than having to pack for a week and
fly overseas! Notice the VT100
terminal I'm using which was a rare luxury that very few of us had on our
desks back
then. I had some very envious colleagues.
In 1990, I started Easyrider LAN Pro. My first project was to build a NOC
using a brand new product called SunNet Manager. At the time, there were
maybe a dozen people in the World who even knew how to spell SNMP. It took
me perhaps 3 nanoseconds to realize that this technology was the wave of the
future and that I needed to become an expert at it. Several
NOCs later and in the mid 1990s, along came agent based technology and the much more
sophisticated and comprehensive monitoring products that are in use today.
It's now 2004 and I have spent the better part of the past 25 years of my
life inventing, evangelizing, architecting, improving and managing remote
computer systems monitoring and administration as a line of business.
So when someone who's in their 30s or 40's tells you that they are an
"expert" with remote monitoring or if a company that was founded in the mid
1990s claims to be "leaders" in proactive monitoring, take this into
consideration, ok?
Were other people working to figure out
how to make remote diagnostics a reality at the same time that I was
trying to get my project off the ground in 1978? I'm sure there were. But most of the latter day
proactive 7x24x365 monitoring "leaders", "experts" and "visionaries" we're hearing
from today were still in
diapers at the time. And if they're so great, how come a lot of our
"competitors" regularly visit our web site to see what new innovations
we've come up with? Right Shawn?
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