Summary:

IT infrastructure has continued to evolve over the 10+ years Opengear has been delivering out-of-band solutions. The need for network resilience has expanded, and Opengear has continued to innovate

Transcript:

We started Opengear in 2004, with Rick Stevenson, CEO, Tony Miranda, who looks after harbor engineering and myself and a couple other technologists. We’ve been working together in previous ventures over the previous decade in the security demand and spotted this, what we see as a very exciting and still immensely exciting growing opportunity and we’ve been growing the business healthfully ever since.

When we entered the market, Out-Of-Band was about Out-Of-Band access, Out-Of-Band serial access to serial ports. When we talk about Out-Of-Band, we talk about Out-Of-Band Management. We aren’t just managing the serial console, we are managing all the consoles, the network consoles, the USB devices. We are not just managing the IT infrastructure, we are managing the power, the physical environment, the security environment, the physical security environment. And we’ve really totally extended the scope of Out-Of-Band of what it was 10 years ago.

A lot of things have changed and evolved since Opengear was founded ten years ago. It used to be that most devices sat in these large buildings, called data centers, where there were lots and lots of computers. Today the borders of the network have basically disappeared. Devices can exist anywhere, compute can exist anywhere, and with the advent of the Internet Of Things, people expect the ability to access things and information anywhere, seamlessly, at anytime.

So our key value for customers is to provide IT resilience to make sure their critical infrastructure stays online so they can continue to deliver on their business missions. And that means two things: one, that means that we help prevent outages. We prevent issues. We do that by providing them with online monitoring, status monitoring, so they can tune and tweak things by using our Out-Of-Band tools. And also in the event of a cybersecurity event or a network outage, they can provide prompt or automated restoration. The pressures for that, to be able to have resilience for your network, not just prevent disaster, but the event disaster has prompt recovery. That’s becoming more and more mission critical for businesses as, again commercial pressures increase.

Today, uptime is more critical than ever. If you look at sectors like financial services or healthcare, where every second of data loss is a critical patient error or a lot of financial loss, a lot of money loss, in transactions. So Out-Of-Band management, today, to be able to maintain 100% uptime has really become more and more critical.

Every network engineer that I’ve talked with gets the solution that we provide. They’ve all been in that situation where they have a remote site, it’s 150 miles away, they have 10 people in the office, they’ve got a server switch and a router in a closet somewhere and the network goes down and they get that call. And they got two choices. I roll a truck and blow a day for 20 minutes to reboot a router. Or, the worst case scenario, you call that office back and say “Sally? Can you find closet with the computer stuff in it and then find that thing that says Cisco, CIS- C-I-S-and then find the power switch and turn it off and count to ten and turn it back on again?”

There’s a lot of things that differentiate Opengear. One is the corporate culture, an open environment, lots of people working and collaborating together. The fact that we listen to our customers while we are a technology company. We are not inward focused; we’re outward focused. We listen our customer and drive our products and technology based upon their needs and we partner with them as we evolve this technology to able to deliver, as their needs change in the market place.

Moving Text-
Out-of-band access, monitoring, auto-response and remediation for IT Resilience
A secure alternate path to devices at your remote sites. Ensures infrastructure is accessible anywhere- even during system or network outage
Monitors everything including the physical environment to proactively detect faults before they become failures
Coupled with Failover to Cellular (F2C) for faster recovery from network and IT failures
Minimizes disruption and downtime, providing the highest levels of business continuity