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The challenge for this effort was to develop an enterprise commercial software product that would be recognized as an industry leader in network device configuration and change management. The product needed to scale to manage large heterogeneous networked environments with as many as 100,000 network devices.
Solution
Over a period of several years the team designed, developed, and released over 6 major releases of an enterprise product based on Java and open source frameworks. The core product captured 100’s of GB of data across various end points on a network and automated tasks such as inventory discovery, configuration capture and management, and policy enforcement and remediation.
Reporting demands grew to a point where the product reporting requirements on the operational database impacted the performance of core product functionality. The end users of the product were demanding a comprehensive BI feature set that supported operational reporting, KPI reporting, and compliance reporting aligned with corporate best practices, industry standards, and regulatory frameworks (DISA/STIG, NSA, PCI-DSS, etc).
In order to meet the growing business intelligence and reporting needs of the user base, the team developed a separate BI solution for the product that hit a dimensional model in a separate data mart. The team evaluated BI solutions from Actuate, Cognos, BIRT, Pentaho, JasperSoft, Yellowfin, and roll-your-own BI solutions. The larger vendors were too big, expensive and not flexible enough to be embedded into a larger platform in an OEM fashion. Open source solutions were too immature and incomplete. The team selected Yellowfin as the embedded reporting solution due to their flexible licensing model, their competitive pricing, and the overall ease of doing business.
Results
The team successfully developed and managed the product through 6 product versions over the span of 7 years. The product was universally recognized as state of the art for Automated Network Management and is currently in use today supporting the world’s largest networks. Clients include: CitiBank, Cingular, Yahoo, AT&T, Cable & Wireless, Microsoft, etc. The product was successfully acquired in 2009. |
