Brian Collins

By Brian Collins
...
... Brian Collins is product manager for Heroix eQ Management Suite, Heroix's multiplatform application monitoring and management software.Before joining Heroix, Brian served as a technology consultant for Andersen Consulting and then as an engineering group leader for Raytheon, where he gained not only a deep understanding of systems issues and software development, but a solid grounding in the real world of business, IT budgets, and time pressure.More information can be found at http://www.heroix.com/.

By Brian Collins
...
... Brian Collins is product manager for Heroix eQ Management Suite, Heroix's multiplatform application monitoring and management software.Before joining Heroix, Brian served as a technology consultant for Andersen Consulting and then as an engineering group leader for Raytheon, where he gained not only a deep understanding of systems issues and software development, but a solid grounding in the real world of business, IT budgets, and time pressure.More information can be found at www.heroix.com.

"With the promise of more enterprise commerce applications based on XML Web Services, we anticipate an even greater need to monitor the core underlying technologies already supported by Heroix eQ, such as SQL Server, Exchange, IIS, and Active Directory," said Brian Collins, Heroix eQ Product Manager.

By Brian Collins

...
Brian Collins is a senior product manager at Heroix Corp. (http://www.heroix.com/), a provider of software products that help organizations guarantee the availability and performance of applications, systems and IT infrastructure.Brian can be reached at brian.collins@heroix.com.

This article appears in the July 2002 issue of Cisco World.

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That limit on resources also puts a premium on products that not only can identify where problems on the network occur, but can also give some way of fixing them, said Brian Collins, product manager for Heroix Corp.Larger organizations with big IT staffs need a broad overview of the network, but smaller organizations need a more "granular" view that shows what is going on with a particular server or other device.

Heroix's eQManagement Suite - a multiplatform solution that manages across Microsoft Corp.'s Windows NT/2000, Unix, Linux, Open VMS and other operating systems - supplies that kind of view by placing agents on each network device to be managed, Collins said.That local intelligence collects data on the device and sends a flag when problems occur and can even be used to correct some problems without human intervention.

"Ultimately, in smaller organizations, people clearly need the ability to quickly identify where the problems are and to fix them," Collins said."This provides one view of the overall network at a very high level of detail, and increasingly, that's what people are looking [to management products] to do."

That ability to create a single view of heterogeneous networks, which even in midlevel agencies are a complex mix of new and legacy systems, has become a definite requirement.Federal systems integrator Jaycor found it a necessity when selling solutions such as its Multi-Domain Security Solution.

MDSS combines segregated, classified networks into a single secure infrastructure while separately managing unclassified networks.

That limit on resources also puts a premium on products that not only can identify where problems on the network occur, but can also give some way of fixing them, said Brian Collins, product manager for Heroix Corp.Larger organizations with big IT staffs need a broad overview of the network, but smaller organizations need a more "granular" view that shows what is going on with a particular server or other device.

Heroix's eQManagement Suite - a multiplatform solution that manages across Microsoft Corp.'s Windows NT/2000, Unix, Linux, Open VMS and other operating systems - supplies that kind of view by placing agents on each network device to be managed, Collins said.That local intelligence collects data on the device and sends a flag when problems occur and can even be used to correct some problems without human intervention.

"Ultimately, in smaller organizations, people clearly need the ability to quickly identify where the problems are and to fix them," Collins said."This provides one view of the overall network at a very high level of detail, and increasingly, that's what people are looking [to management products] to do."

That ability to create a single view of heterogeneous networks, which even in midlevel agencies are a complex mix of new and legacy systems, has become a definite requirement.Federal systems integrator Jaycor found it a necessity when selling solutions such as its Multi-Domain Security Solution.

MDSS combines segregated, classified networks into a single secure infrastructure while separately managing unclassified networks.