LAYING THE GROUNDWORK
Rudolph and Sletten realized that to keep its reputation as a leading builder, it had to walk the walk from an infrastructure point of view. "Our emphasis is and always will be doing what we do best, which is building buildings," says Lamonica. "And what we want to spend most of our time, energy, and resources on is making sure we do the best possible job we can in building high-tech buildings."
So, as Lamonica puts it, it was clearly time to "drain the swamp"--that is, replace all the company's aging infrastructure devices. He also says he wanted to dump the company's unreliable Sendmail POP3-based e-mail system for Microsoft's Exchange/Outlook tandem, which would provide the company with collaboration capabilities such as calendaring and contact management functions lacking in Sendmail.
"We couldn't do that, however, because we didn't have a stable infrastructure," he says. And the only way to get that was to get a handle on what was working and what wasn't. What the company needed was a network monitoring solution.
GroundWork's open-source Monitor got the call. Several factors were at play here, not the least of which was cost, Lamonica admits.
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