Winn Stephenson, senior vice president of
IT, FedEx Services
Company: FedEx, Memphis, Tenn.
Years in networking: 25
Product choice: Cisco's 2500, 6500 and
7000 series routers; Nortel's Passport switches; Hewlett-Packard OpenView network
management
Explanation: "We make firm decisions about what we want our networks
to do and then find the vendors that are best suited to that task. Cisco and
Nortel, for us, are those vendors. Cisco is a very deep partner with us on our
network designs. We use Cisco's very small 2500 series routers out on the edge
of the network, and the 7000 series and 6500 series for our core. We use Nortel
a lot in our backbone networks to do the combining of voice and data and those
kinds of things. We have a two-stage network: a very high-speed backbone based
on Nortel Passports and a very large edge network and IP overlay based on Cisco
technology. And with those tools, we get the "best' in both areas.
"In our network, management is key. Our most overarching
high-performance network management tool is HP OpenView. We decided on that
a long time ago, and it has served us well. We've entertained discussions
about moving away from it, but no other tool is as useful. We keep adding
to it, and other products keep feeding into it. It's still ‘the
best' and it certainly best fits the needs we have for network management."
Van Nguyen, director of global security
Company: APL Limited, Oakland, Calif.
Years in networking: 18
Product choice: SilentRunner's
SilentRunner network analysis tool
Explanation: "SilentRunner is
the best ó definitely. It helped me with an investigation where we had an internal
group of people who were misusing their privileges on the network and their
knowledge of the business to run their own separate business on the side. Using
SilentRunner, we were able to show exactly what happened, what communications
were being used ó because they were using out-of-band communications like Hotmail,
Yahoo, chatting, those types of things ó and we were able to capture the evidence.
We showed exactly what happened on a specific date, and we played it back. It
was awesome, and they were caught red-handed. This happened about a year and
a half ago, when we had a very limited headcount in security. I did this investigation
just myself and was successful. It's a great tool."
Roger Smith, director of IS
Company: Manufacturers Services, Concord, Mass.
Years in networking: 15
Product choice: InteQ InfraSolve outsourced maintenance and monitoring
service
Explanation: "InteQ is the ‘best' from our perspective, because
it lets us derive the benefits of full-service network monitoring without having
to invest in the infrastructure necessary to deliver it. The service is far
more cost-effective than having our internal staff handle it. When you look
at what it costs for the resources, hardware, software, ongoing maintenance
and support required to do full-featured network monitoring, and combine it
with the outages we've avoided at the site level, I would say we're saving in
the range of $200,000 to $300,000 per year by using InteQ. It also lets us focus
our IT resources on improving and extending services, on the value-add. We offload
to InteQ all of the boring and mundane stuff, and we do the exciting things.
That definitely makes it a ‘best.' "
Kevin Ertell, vice
president of online operations
Company: Tower Records, West Sacramento, Calif.
Years in networking: 8
Product choice: Qualys' Managed Vulnerability Assessment
service
Explanation: "A vulnerability-assessment service is crucial
to any business these days, and with our e-commerce store and
extranet, a service like this is especially critical. And Qualys
is good because it's a third party, which means it gives you an
unbiased perspective. I think it's the best because it was extremely
easy to get started with, and it provides really easy-to-read
detailed reports that not only show you problems but suggested
solutions and ways to plug up potential vulnerabilities. Other
services I looked at weren't as easy to use or as helpful."
