Ipswitch banking on Asia Pacific to fuel growth

• Asia Pacific to be major growth area over the next few years
• Companies are using too many tools to monitor IT networks

NETWORK monitoring solutions provider Ipswitch Inc is expecting its business to experience a significant jump over the next few years, as it increases its focus on growing the Asia Pacific markets.

"We have a plan to triple the business (in Asia Pacific) by 2018. We are confident that we have what it takes to achieve it," said Ipswitch senior vice president of international sales Alessandro Porro in a Digital News Asia interview in Kuala Lumpur recently.

"It is not just hope or aspiration, but there's a methodological plan behind it."

The strategy to increase its focus on the Asian market follows signs showing the region's increasing appetite for IT solutions. 

Over the recent years, IT spend in Asia Pacific, including South-East Asia, has outgrown developed regions like the US and Europe. 

A Gartner report revealed that worldwide IT spending is expected to be flattish in 2016 at US$3.41 trillion (RM14.01 trillion), however, Asian countries like Malaysia and Singapore are expected to grow by 6.5% and 4.8% respectively at US$16.8 billion and US$22.2 billion, respectively.

In the enterprise space, Asian companies are also spending more money on IT products and solutions this year. A report by IDC indicated that the global server market declined by 0.4% in the second quarter 2016. In contrast, Asia Pacific (excluding Japan) recorded a 7.4% growth during the same period.

Another reason why Ipswitch hopes to increase its focus in the region is that its business in Asia is still relatively small in terms of revenue contribution.  

In terms of  new license sale, Asia Pacific currently contributes 15% of the group's global revenue, and Porro is confident that the revenue contribution will grow significantly over the next few years.

"We believe it has what it takes to be as big as the US markets one day."

Solving IT professionals' problem

In a recent survey report published by Ipswitch, it was revealed that 66% of IT professionals feel that increasing IT complexity is making it more difficult for them to do their jobs. 

It was also revealed that the four key areas of complexities and challenges for IT professionals were cloud application, virtualisation, bring your own device (BYOD) trend, and the increase in wireless network and mobile devices.
 
"88% of the respondents said that they want IT management software that offers more monitoring flexibility, with fewer licensing restrictions," said Porro (right).

This is where Porro believes Ipswitch can help companies and enterprises to achieve better clarity on their IT infrastructure, as the company has a suite of products that can help address the challenges.

"Our solutions are able to do multiple things -- from simple network discovery, mapping, monitoring, bandwidth traffic analysis and alerting of those devices' status. 

"Today, one of the challenges that organisation faces is the proliferation of BYOD or wireless parts. IT professionals not only need to be able to identify what these devices are, but also to be able to ensure that they have enough bandwidth so that the actual employees' work would not be disrupted," said Porro.

The company recently launched its new WhatsUp Gold 2017 - a solution that helps IT to monitor their network, servers and application easily.  

Besides monitoring network, servers and application, WhatsUp Gold is also able to monitor web performance, conduct network bandwidth optimisation, manage configuration and to manage logs and events.
 
What also makes its WhatsUp Gold interesting is the way it licenses and packages the solution. Their tools are licensed under a single license, based on the type of monitoring needed -- ProView (for network and server monitoring); TotalView (End to end visibility) and TotalView Plus (End to end visibility plus administration).

"Our pricing model is less complicated. Customers only need to pay based on the number of devices they need to monitor, regardless of the number of ports, interfaces and monitors those devices contain," explained Torro.

"With our solutions, IT professionals will easily have total control of their IT infrastructure."

Survey findings

The Ipswitch survey also revealed that 38% of IT teams are using more than three tools to monitor their networks, and many organisations are using 10-20 tools.

"This results in IT professionals spending too much time switching from tool to tool to try to get an accurate view into their application and infrastructure performance," said Porro.

What's surprising is that, even with all these tools, 44% of the IT teams reported that they were either not monitoring everything that they would like to, or don't know if they were monitoring everything, in order to ensure control.

Top reasons for this include budget (28%), lack of staff (18%) as well as the complexity of the IT environment (15%).

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