A review of 2006 at OPENXTRA

Well, 2007 is here and I thought it would be interesting to review 2006 at OPENXTRA.

I don’t think that 2006 was a great year for new products…in fact I’d say it was quite poor.

The highlight on the cable testing side is the Test-Um Validator-NT, solid 1 gig testing with the addition of network testing features makes for a good all round tester.

The Sensatronics side has seen the addition of the U4 and U16 devices. The universal devices have the ability to change the temperature ranges they can monitor. Not really of interest to IT managers monitoring a data centre, but very useful for more specialist environments. The most interesting environment we supplied the U4 monitor was a fish smoking factory. On the alerting side, we have added the Falcom Samba range of GSM modems. Whilst the fixed line Z-Text is great for sending text not everybody has a fixed line available.

On the software side we launched the Sensatronics SDK and the Z-Text SDK. Both provide an easy to use programming interface for the Sensatronics range of temperature monitors and the Z-Text SMS modem respectively. We have also created a Google Desktop Gadget for the Sensatronics range too. Expect to see more desktop style plug-ins this year.

We’ve finally managed to move office. I am happy to say that the new office is rather more pleasant than the last office, and there is more room too! Oh the joys of central heating…

The website has had another busy year. We changed dedicated server provider, achieved PCI DSS, changed payment provider and implemented a new e-commerce system. Phew, I’m glad we don’t have to do that again. Oh, and we jumped onto the blog bandwagon too!

As for the industry in general, everything is converging on the network and I mean everything. So, for all of the IT managers out there, you are going to be managing a whole lot more kit, things that ten years ago you wouldn’t have dreamed would be under your control.