* The VirtelaView customer management portal
Virtela has rolled out a new customer portal that features more details about its LAN, WAN and security services as well as a map-based interface to make it easier for customers to determine the status of their networks.
The VirtelaView customer management portal provides more visibility into Virtela’s managed network and security operations. The new world map feature offers a graphical view of real-time network statistics from 190-plus countries.
Virtela officials say this portal upgrade is the most significant in a year.
“What’s interesting and unique about the new version of the portal is the breadth and depth of the data,” says Jeff Phillips, vice president of product marketing for Virtela. “Virtela is unifying the data in three areas – LAN, WAN and security – that were silos within the enterprise.”
Philips says the new portal is more transparent in terms of the data that it is providing to customers about the operation of Virtela’s network. He says the new mapping feature shows all of the important data about a customer’s IT infrastructure in one centralized view.
All of Virtela’s customers have access to VirtelaView at no extra cost.
Rod Brandon, director of IT with the Muscular Dystrophy Association, says VirtelaView was a useful tool as the organization upgraded 250 field offices in the United States and Puerto Rico from MCI’s dial-up service to Virtela’s managed DSL service.
“VirtelaView allows us to see what’s going on in terms of the changes to the network, orders that they have in the queue, and the state of lines that are having trouble,” Brandon says. “When we were rolling out the DSL service, we used VirtelaView a lot because we could see which services were brought up. For services that weren’t up, we could see what stage they were at.”
The Muscular Dystrophy Association uses Virtela to provide managed DSL services at its field offices and to aggregate traffic sent to its national office in Tucson, Ariz. Virtela also manages firewalls and an intrusion protection system for the association. Its network has 1,300 users and costs around $700,000 per year.
“Virtela gives us a very stable and well-maintained network,” Brandon says. “We are well aware of issues when they come up, and we track them in VirtelaView.”
