‘No one tells a story like we do’

Absolutely no one is able to tell a story the way we can. Managing the entire IT, we sort of stand out because we bring all of those aspects together that are beneficial to the actual user, says Sascha Giese, Head Geek at SolarWinds.

What made SolarWinds stand out among its competitors to be named a Leader in the GigaOm Radar Report for Network and Cloud Observability?

When it comes to observability, it’s kind of like a buzzword that came up a couple of years ago, but there’s no set way to describe it. So each observability vendor has its own way of explaining what it actually means. For us, it is a kind of evolution of monitoring and management that has propelled us to the forefront of network management. 

However, we have been focusing on many other areas for more than ten years because we see it as a very fragile construct based on different teams. To give you an example, it’s incredibly challenging to bring together teams for things like network team, server team, cloud architects, etc. Additionally, the first concern when anything breaks is not how to fix it, but rather who will fix it.

Customers, therefore, require a single platform that presents all teams with the same level of information and enables users to escalate cases to the resolver group. Since absolutely no one is able to tell a story the way we can. Managing the entire IT, we sort of stand out because we bring all of those aspects together that are beneficial to the actual user.

Could you provide more information about the New Software Development Process SolarWinds has introduced and how it addresses the needs of enterprise software security today?

The new software design process, known as Secure by Design, is an industry first. We came up with this after a December 2020 incident in which our development line was compromised and hackers inserted malicious code into each update that we sent.

To prevent this from happening again, we changed the way software vendors create software. We still have the developer writing code, but we ask them to document every step they take. And, before we use that code, we have a second team that recreates it based on the documentation. Then there’s a third team whose sole responsibility is to compare those two sources of code and ensure their integrity and authenticity are always perfect. In my cooking analogy, it would be like a judge checking to see if what you cook is the same as what I cook.

What major goals do you have for your participation in Gitex this year? Tell us about the products and solutions you are exhibiting.

The main goal is always to meet the people over there. So we only go there once, maybe twice a year. But that is essentially the only time we meet the locals who are our customers. We also have long-term relationships with many of our customers. So it’s always nice to meet and greet them, shake hands, and talk about what’s important.

We, at SolarWinds, want to know how they feel about our tool and if they have any feedback for us. And they usually come to us because they want to know what is new and what we have planned. It is therefore critical to establish that relationship, and there are many new things this time around.