SolarWinds Redefines Network Management for the Mid-market

AUSTIN, TX (PRWeb) February 5, 2007 -- SolarWinds, a leader in network management software, today announced strong momentum and additional investment in the mid-market, showcasing new products to better serve the needs of customers and create business opportunities for the SolarWinds partner community. The new offerings include: a major version update to Orion Network Performance Monitor (Orion), and Orion NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NetFlow Traffic Analyzer), a new module in the Orion product line.

SolarWinds, founded in 1998 and profitable since its founding, has 40,000 customers worldwide, 600,000 freeware users, more than 400 business partners and greater than $50 million annual sales run rate. For the past 5 years, SolarWinds has consistently grown revenues more than 40 percent annually. More significantly, this growth has been created while delivering operating profits in excess of 50 percent of sales due to the Company's unique, low-touch sales and delivery operating model. Today, SolarWinds also announced that Austin Ventures has recently joined Bain Capital and Insight Venture Partners as a strategic investor in the company.    

"We believe SolarWinds is at the forefront of how to effectively bring network management to mid-market businesses," said John Thornton, general partner at Austin Ventures. "Its innovative operating model and approach to developing and delivering shrink-wrapped enterprise software is changing the rules of how network management software is viewed and adopted by the mid-market."

SolarWinds products are geared to mid-market customers (100 to 5,000 employees) who need a scalable, easy-to-use network management solution for 250 to 10,000 managed elements at an affordable price point providing quick time to value. Mid-market businesses and much larger enterprise companies who purchase at a divisional or departmental level face the same challenges as the largest enterprises, but with fewer human and capital resources at their disposal. Unlike traditional framework solutions that have not been designed with the mid-market business in mind and often require a dedicated trained resource just to manage the management system, SolarWinds products were developed by network engineers for network engineers and download, install and deploy in minutes. SolarWinds' unique ability to provide engineers with functionally robust solutions while maintaining ease of use and affordability has a direct correlation to the success SolarWinds is seeing across the mid-market. In 2006 alone, more than 2000 new mid-market customers adopted Orion, including Smart City Networks, the nation's largest provider of event technology in the convention industry.

"As a midsize company we needed an enterprise-class solution without the enterprise-class price. We also wanted to select a vendor whose products could scale as our needs changed. We started with the first Network Performance Monitor application in the Toolset. Over the years, we upgraded to Orion Network Performance Monitor and Engineer's ToolSet and recently added Cirrus Configuration Manager," said Ronald Shaul, director of Technology Development at Smart City. "We evaluated a number of solutions on the market and Orion is just as scalable and flexible as many other large, expensive framework solutions such as HP OpenView, but requires significantly less effort to use and maintain. SolarWinds products have paid for themselves ten times over, and serve as an easy-to-use, intuitive, all-in-one solution."

SolarWinds Expands Product Portfolio for Mid-market
SolarWinds is announcing the new 8.0 release of Orion, a comprehensive Web-enabled fault, bandwidth and performance management platform and NetFlow Traffic Analyzer, a new module in the Orion product line. With the addition of NetFlow Traffic Analyzer, Orion now supports Cisco NetFlow statistics. Key capabilities in Orion 8.0 include:

•Custom MIB Support - Users can create a custom poller to monitor any device value that has a MIB on any SNMP-enabled device, which amounts to virtually any statistic that a network device records. Examples of the kinds of monitoring enabled by custom MIBs include monitoring temperature on a switch, fan speed on a router and battery status on a UPS.
•Advanced Alerting - Users can specify what kind of alerts they want to receive. For example, they can set up correlated alerts (alerting only if X and Y are both true), sustained alerts (alerting only if X is true for Y period of time) and escalated alerts (notify engineer No. 1, but if there's no response in a specified time period, notify engineer No. 2).
•SNMP v3 Support - Allows more secure polling of SNMP values from any device that supports SNMP v3.
•SNMP Trap Reception - Orion can receive SNMP traps, which are specially-configured notifications sent by network devices when unusual events are detected on that node.

Over the next 12-months, SolarWinds will expand Orion to monitor and manage VoIP, as well as deliver additional application performance monitoring and network service monitoring. The company will also release multiple new versions of its award-winning SolarWinds Toolset, which will include tighter integration with Orion. To continue to assist network managers in meeting regulatory requirements, SolarWinds will also deliver new and enhanced products in the areas of device inventory and configuration and change management.

Availability and Pricing
Orion Network Performance Monitor v8 and Netflow Traffic Analyzer are available for download at http://www.solarwinds.net. Pricing for Orion starts at $2475 for 100 interfaces. Pricing for Netflow Traffic Analyzer starts at $875 for 10 interfaces. For more information please visit http://www.solarwinds.net or contact the SolarWinds sales department at 866-530-8100.

About SolarWinds
SolarWinds is a leading provider of Windows-based network management, network monitoring and network discovery software. More than 40,000 customers spanning the military, Fortune 500 companies, government agencies and education institutions have chosen SolarWinds to reduce network downtime, monitor network performance, manage network compliance and change and improve staff efficiency. SolarWinds has developed and brought to market award-winning solutions that address the needs of mid-market network engineers from performance management to fault monitoring to configuration management. For more information, please visit http://www.SolarWinds.Net.

SolarWinds, SolarWinds.Net and Orion are registered trademarks of SolarWinds.Net. All other company and product names mentioned are used only for identification purposes and may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. Learn more about our network management solutions now.

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