Network Field Day 6 - Post Mortem

It has been close to a month since I participated in Network Field Day 6 and I am finally getting a chance to write up my thoughts and feelings about the experience overall but also the companies that participated and hosted all the delegates to show us what they are doing.

First, a quick perspective on what Stephen Foskett is doing with Tech Field Day (and all the related events he is involved with) - simply amazing. I can't say enough about how impressed I was with the event. The engagement and quality of the delegates was fantastic and the overall experience of interacting and meeting folks of that caliber was really special. For that alone I give a tip of the hat to Stephen, Tom and Claire for all their hard work in pulling together such a unique opportunity and event.

Second, I have a slightly different perspective of things being a first time delegate and perhaps not as prolific a blogger as some of the other delegates. I thought since I have had some time to think about who I saw at NFD6 I would give you my impressions of the companies who presented and which has had a lasting impact of still being top of mind for me.

With that, I would say the lasting impact company has to be ThousandEyes. Thousand Eyes has an IT performance management platform that I can see a ton of different customers using to solve all sorts of unique problems that until now are relatively difficult to do.

First of all, the easiest way to see how their product works is to check out their videos that gives the overview. What struck me right away with what they were doing is how obvious it was and then wondering why no one had done that before! To me, that is the sign of a great product, when it just clicks and makes sense.

So what is unique about what they are doing? It is the marriage of good graphical monitoring solution with public and private agents but designed for monitoring SaaS applications. They aggregate information from both private agents (that you can run from any location you control) and public agent sites that they maintain. In addition, their service and design works so well that major SaaS providers are using it themselves to measure their performance. If you are responsible for measuring and reporting on SaaS SLA's at all than you should be seriously looking at what they are doing. That really is how they are unique. There are lots of performance monitoring tools out in the market but this is the first that marry together these functions and in an elegant way that is very intuitive.

To be fair, I was impressed with many of the other manufactures that participated in NFD6 and I will likely take a moment to put a blog article together on them also but of all the companies Thousand Eyes really stood out. So there you have it, a company you should really go check out what they are doing.
- Ed


Disclosure and Disclaimer:
Thousand Eyes (and other manufactures) participated in the Networking Field Day 6 event, thus indirectly covering some of my travel expenses. At no time did they ask for, nor where they promised any kind of consideration in the writing of this review.  The opinions and analysis provided within are my own and any errors or omissions are mine and mine alone unless I specifically blame someone else for my mistakes, which is uncool but might happen.