NetEqualizer News Blog

Introduction from Art Reisman, CTO of APconnections
During a challenging economy, APconnections has remained committed to our customers and to our employees.  As part of this commitment, APconnections sponsors an internship program.  We believe that internships help talented, smart people get started in a new industry or technology area.  Please help us to welcome our new intern, Lynne, who will post to this blog periodically about her experiences at APconnections.

Thoughts from Lynne the intern:
I am starting an internship at APconnections, helping in the sales & marketing departments.  I’m really excited to get going on some of the projects that we have been thinking up, and mostly, to start interacting with you, our customers and prospects, to see what you are looking for from us.

My background is in IT, and I studied “management information systems” as part of my MBA, so I understand this product somewhat.  However, my career started in application development, and then moved to operations, and then back to application architecture.  So to say that I have focused on “applications” is an understatement!

Over my career in IT, I have also been a “generalist”, involved in projects as diverse as wireless, migrating O/S platforms and hardware servers, deploying websites, and rolling out ACH, as I enjoy learning all aspects of IT.  I have also project-managed, program-managed, and just overall managed stuff.   I have found in my “management” roles that I ended up being a de facto internal product manager for my software application.  I have become really interested in product management/marketing/sales and “product advocate” roles.  With the advent of social media, I’m really interested in taking this up a level for APconnections. 

This internship with APconnections gives me a chance to expand my experience in the IT product management/marketing/sales arena with a dynamic, growing, internet-based company.  I also think it is important to work with a product that I can believe in; it is obvious to me from the many repeat customers and “word-of-mouth” marketing that NetEqualizer has a recognized, compelling value proposition.

I hope to leverage my experience as a de facto product manager to help APconnections build a library of content.  My goal is to help encapsulate our expertise on networking, shaping, and all things related to bandwidth optimization into materials that help you, our customer.

As this is my first week, you can imagine that it has been learning all about “bandwidth shaping” and trying to figure out all the acronyms used in this space.  So far, I’ve picked up the following:  NIC, NAT, VLANs, VoIP, CF, and P2P.

I’ve read the entire FAQ (a good source if you want to see what questions people have on the NetEqualizer), the “Hitchhikers Guide to Network and WAN Optimization Technologies” White Paper (a fun read, I like that it is product agnostic), and of course reviewed the Online Demo (nice to see what the web front-end looks like – it is a real site!).  After all that, I still have some questions…  All that got me thinking…. if I was a management type trying to figure out what the NetEqualizer does (and I am), what would help me to better understand it?

My thoughts immediately turn to pictures, as I’m highly visual, and then of course to summaries, as who has time to review all the details!  On both those notes, here is what I’m thinking of putting together so far…

1. 1 page picture(s) showing the Typical NetEqualizer Configuration
   (where to put it) by industry (if it differs)
2. 1 page NetEqualizer Key Features & Functions Cheat Sheet
   Basically “what do I care about?”  in terms I understand (so-called management speak)
3. Typical Network Traffic Flows, their sizes, and typical priorities
   To help management understand what VoIP, web pages, emails, video, real-time streaming video, and other typical types of traffic look like & behave like

And for you more technical types, I have thought of one thing so far…

1. Cheat Sheet on the Default NetEqualizer Setup
   All the parameters that are set, all that are not, and what your options are to change these (and why). 

So that’s it for Week 1.  I will keep you updated on my progress throughout my internship.  I look forward to talking to some of you soon, to hear your thoughts!  In the meantime, if you have other ideas on what would help you (or me!) get up-to-speed on the NetEqualizer, networking, or the shaping world in general, email me at sales@apconnections.net.  Thanks!