Ambassador Program
Jakub Kabat, Marketing & Communications Specialist, IP Fabric spoke last week with Joe Kershaw, Channel Lead, IP Fabric about the upcoming launch of Community Fabric the global ambassador program from the rapidly growing network intelligence and analytics platform vendor… here’s what he had to say:
Hey Joe, so recently at IP Fabric you decided to launch an ambassador program. Can you tell us something more about it and what are you trying to achieve with it?
Hi Jakub, So I guess a good place to start would be the formation of IP Fabric. The organisation wasn’t founded on a commercially driven whim to peddle a platform for the sake of selling software. Our co-founders lived and breathed the practical frustrations of network engineering consultants for over 40 years of combined professional experience and built the platform to provide a better way-of-working for network engineers and architects. Initially, they had the intention of returning with the platform to their jobs as network engineering consultants, but progress took over.
Allowing Engineers to spend more time on testing out theories, trialing innovation and collaborating on solving issues in resiliency, availability and security can only be a good thing, right? We want our ambassador program to drive the discussion of innovation whilst in-parallel help them to achieve it.
Channel Lead, IP Fabric
Who is a perfect candidate for the role of IP Fabric Ambassador?
The intention of the ambassador community is to incite discussion, drive collaboration across disconnected, international projects and provoke the natural desire in network engineers for innovation. So, the perfect candidate is a driven networking professional with a desire to disrupt mundane and inefficient practices, adopt new technology and push the forefront of the IT networking profession.
Cool! So now we have a clear image of a perfect candidate. Why do you feel these professionals would want to join the program?
It really depends on what drives and motivates people. We have tried to come up with a range of different benefits that may incentivise networking professionals to get involved. First and foremost, the IP Fabric platform is being developed to solve their specific problems in client engagements, from network discovery through visualisation and onto documentation and more. So, getting access to the platform, free of cost should pique their interest initially. Further benefits of being able to get involved with our product R&D teams and to use the community as a platform to elevate their own services and brands will hopefully sustain that interest. I am completely open to suggestions as the community develops and will be interested to hear what our ambassadors would find compelling to maintain their involvement and commitment going forward.
Marketing & Communication Specialist
Can you tell us a little bit more how cooperation within the program work? How does an ambassador contribute to the program? How does he or she stay in touch?
We are not expecting this program to explode in numbers as we want to cooperate with people who are particularly passionate about innovation, social networking and community collaboration. As such, ambassadors will have direct communication with me at the beginning and ongoing throughout the program or with my great teammates Tillman Kraeft if they prefer French or German and Giorgio Pontilio if they’re Italian speaking.
Realistically, we don’t want to dictate how ambassadors contribute to the program. Some professionals are more comfortable delivering classes and presentation than writing blogs or provoking discussion in online communities so we are happy to leave it up to the individual, we just want a mutual discussion every six months to discuss whether the program is worthwhile and whether we mutually agree on continuing with the collaboration.
Where can a potential candidate learn more about the Ambassador Program and the most importantly how to apply for the program?
We have all the information at our dedicated Community Fabric page but if you prefer the personal touch as I do, just drop me an email at [email protected]
As networks become increasingly complex, the job of network administrators becomes more and more demanding. To understand the sheer amount of effort that the role takes, you only have to look at the task of analyzing the enormous amounts to status information within a network.
With the methods that most organizations are using, analyzing network status, preventing link capacity and node overloads, and having enough information to take immediate action within your network is virtually impossible.
If network admins were able to harness the power of network visualization and dynamic network mapping regularly, instead of it being a long, laborious process that takes months to create, they’d suddenly be able to visualize the relationships between network elements and have an accurate representation of the network’s graph structure.
Network visualization helps clarify and define the relationships between network nodes and the links between them and displays them either as an online (live) diagram or an offline diagram.
When dealing with network visualization, several rules need to be considered.
For this example, we’re going to use seven rules from Eugen Goldstein, the German physicist that is often credited with the discovery of the proton, and apply them to network visualization software.
Also, as another example, other basic rules which can be good to consider, are:
These rules were given by Ben Shneiderman (an American computer scientist).
Network visualization helps users connect the dots more quickly than just staring at a spreadsheet of data. With visualization, reports can be more straightforward and can be far more effective. These easy to follow reports provide network engineers the intelligence for monitoring, troubleshooting and gathering reports of the network, which helps them to analyze and understand the status of their networks nodes, links, and more.
Network visualization tools can also help network security engineers handle security issues and more easily observe the status of their systems.
The monitoring software helps network engineers visualize the patterns within their complexed network, which enables them to troubleshoot issues and make informed decisions much more quickly, minimizing downtime during outages. Visualizations can be used in offline mode, giving you the flexibility to view a static picture, or online mode, which lets you see changes as they’re discovered in real-time.
If they were armed with network visualizations, admins would soon find that troubleshooting, assessing, and planning out their networks would be a piece of cake! Unfortunately, features like these go far beyond what any legacy network tools are able to provide.
That’s where IP Fabric comes in.
IP Fabric’s platform uses visualization to provide users with detailed tech visibility and drill-downs on dynamic network maps. The system visualizes individual technology and protocols, which enables network engineers to plan changes, troubleshoot connectivity issues, and document the network.
Mapping out and verifying end-to-end paths, from switching through balancing to firewall and cluster policies, enables network engineers to troubleshoot issues much quicker, and to communicate with other engineers about the network.
Using visualization, IP Fabric maps out complete active network paths between any two endpoints. The map shows you the routing and switching forwarding decisions, including the results of all of the security decisions of all active path filters for the specific source-destination pair.
End to end path mapping
As a network engineer, it’s incredibly important to be able to see your site-to-site connectivity or your individual sites, including all of your managed and unmanaged devices (including wired/wireless users, or IP phones). IP Fabric visualizes the details of individual protocols or aggregate links and topologies into a representative view.
IP Fabric helps you delve into active QoS, applied Access Control Lists, or transmission issues on any of the diagrams. Use the platform to verify links and device redundancy, or visually analyze specific protocol topology.
Try IP Fabric for yourself and see just how useful network visualization and network dynamic diagrams can really be.
