Staying the path: lessons from Microsoft Ignite 2019

Ah, Microsoft Ignite. Good times have been had, but also important lessons were learned. Anyone who attends trade shows like Ignite can tell you: the long hours and dizzying pace of conversations yield results. Not only in terms of sales leads, which are always welcome, but also in getting a pulse reading for the industry.

We’re doing the right thing…

Of course we believe we’re on the right track, otherwise we wouldn’t be on it. But it’s an incomparable feeling to be validated by both customers (who are very happy with using the Men&Mice Suite) and visitors (who were impressed by our demo).

The landscape of networks and IP infrastructure management is changing. It used to be that you had to keep up with the latest hardware and software trends. Buy the next server; upgrade to the next version. However, increasingly it seems today’s (and tomorrow’s) task is keeping up with change itself.

Men&Mice has been building its products around that task for decades. And people are recognizing and appreciating it more and more.

… but there’s room to improve

When change is your only constant, it goes without saying that work is never done. As much as we pride ourselves on our ability for predicting change instead of catching up with it, we’re always looking for feedback.

Every trade show we visit offers plenty of opportunities to learn what ails the people running networks. We listen to people asking for support for a particular hardware or software and see an incredible yearn for automation. And we're glad to be able to tell them 'yes.'

The Men&Mice Suite has been supporting a multitude of different platforms — including our competitors! — and we’re constantly working on adding more. And our fully featured REST and SOAP APIs always get people excited: “Are we really able to do all that with a single API layer?” Yes!

Onward!

All in all: with a new release of the Men&Mice Suite just around the corner, Microsoft Ignite was a great opportunity for self-reflection.

We have an awesome product, positioned right, and a growing and loyal customer base. Improvements are implemented consistently, and based on the feedback we’re focusing on the right things.

We’ll attend one more event in 2019, the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference in London. Our CEO Magnús Björnsson will speak about network management in this hybrid and multicloud world, and how it changes the need for DevOps, automation, and changing the way we see networks.

After that? 2020. We feel good about what’s coming next year.