Times are tough for many businesses yet the ‘pain zone’ itself can be the inspiration for creative solutions, according to Paessler country manager Martin Hodgson.
Hodgson likens this to the challenge of becoming and staying fit. He finds that, not only does physical fitness contribute to mental health, but the same grit and determination he needs to get out and ride his bike in the depths of winter is also needed at work.
“I find it the perfect way to deal with frustrations when they happen, and often do my most creative thinking deep in the ‘pain zone’,” he says.
2020 was a difficult year from multiple perspectives, yet Hodgson says the Paessler team — including the IT team, successfully navigated the key obstacles.
“I’m really impressed with how we’ve dealt with 2020 – our UK team were already home based, and made extensive use of remote technologies, but for our HQ in Nuremberg it was a bigger challenge,” he says.
Paessler continued rearchitecting some of its technologies, including “taking a small step backward” to accelerate the rate of development of flagship monitoring solution PRTG. This also helped it respond quickly to the demands of its customers in turbulent times. It also continued to build its customer base.
“A good example is the Zoom sensor [or] video conferencing that used to be a nice to have has become a key service for many IT teams,” Hodgson notes.
“I guess if everything worked perfectly, first time, and every time, and there were infinite computing resources, then at a push you might argue there’d be no need for our products.”
The broadening of IT is happening daily, he says, whether this is about adding cloud, IoT, OT or IIoT. Overall, it means that IT teams are responsible for more systems, devices and users than ever before — and this isn’t likely to change.
“We’ve added a number of capabilities that broaden the scope of PRTG, allowing us to monitor OT, IoT and IIoT. This takes us into the industrial, process and operational space – supporting IT/OT convergence with an overview of both IT and OT worlds.
“This has generated an awful lot of attention, and the feedback from these customers is just how flexible our product is,” Hodgson says.
(Photo courtesy of Paessler – All rights reserved 2021)
