PATCH MANAGER has a powerful data migration toolkit that safeguards against data loss from your current solution. PATCH MANAGER also prevents inconsistencies in your current data from being migrated, and due to PATCH MANAGER’s comprehensive and detailed data modeling, typically results in data enrichment after migration. PATCH MANAGER provides powerful reporting functionality to generate and customize engineering and management reports. Not only will you be able to recreate the reports from your existing solution, but a far broader scope of reporting will be possible.
If your current solution is integrated with other systems within your organization, replacing and potentially enhancing these integrations is made straightforward by PATCH MANAGER’s comprehensive bi-directional REST API.
PATCH MANAGER is fully featured, architected on open standards, and designed to be powerful, yet easy to use. This allows you to take complete ownership of the application with minimal external assistance required. That said, our highly skilled team of consultants are happy to share their best-practice experience to help you along the way.
Are you satisfied with your current solution for managing your physical layer network infrastructure? Is it well-suited to managing the complexity and diversity of networks in today’s world? Does it provide the features required to optimize your operational efficiency? Does it integrate seamlessly into your organization’s application architecture? Is it easy to operate and to on-board new users? Does it even have a long-term development vision/support?
In this article, we address these questions, and propose PATCH MANAGER as the ideal candidate for replacing your current solution, whether it is a commercial or a free open source one.
Are you looking to implement cable and asset management software for the first time? Here is an article on why it’s worth investing in an infrastructure management software solution. Request a personal online demo of PATCH MANAGER here.
Assessing your current solution for managing your physical layer network infrastructure
Is it well-suited to managing the complexity and diversity of networks in today’s world?
Network cabling and infrastructure technologies evolve. For example, in recent years, optimization of space and communication bandwidth in data centers has been achieved through the introduction of high-density panels with MPO connectivity.
Network architectures evolve. Not only are they getting bigger, but in many cases, they span both inside and outside plant domains. As such, these domains can no longer be seen as separate islands in terms of cabling and infrastructure management.
The key to being a well-suited solution to manage this evolution is configurability. The solution should be ‘future-proofed’, designed to be able to adapt, without requiring software changes every time a new network technology or architecture is introduced.
Does it provide the features required to optimize your operational efficiency?
Efficiently executing moves, adds and changes in a network typically involves the planning and coordination of work processes across various teams and job roles. To support this, a solution should provide work-flow management features that are capable of seamlessly mapping to your work processes. In addition, these features should work hand-in-hand with access rights management features to ensure that changes can only be planned within the scope of each team or job role.
Does it integrate seamlessly into your organization’s application architecture?
Cable and infrastructure data is a root component of the assets of an enterprise, and many processes within an enterprise have a dependency on this data. For example, the efficiency of network monitoring and service management tools can be greatly enhanced if they know the physical whereabouts and connectivity of the assets in the network.
In order to support such sharing of data, the solution should provide a flexible and open means of system integration.
Is it easy to operate and to on-board new users?
As with any operational support solution, the goal of the application should be to make life easier for the users, not to be a burdensome task in itself to maintain and operate.
Does it even have long term vision/support?
Enterprise security and platform requirements evolve as new technologies become available. It is key that a solution should not only meet these requirements in their current form. The solution should have an active product development plan to support the requirements as they evolve and should not be at risk of becoming end-of-life. For example, in the cable management domain, the Brady NetDoc solution recently became end-of-life. And a risk of free open source software tools is that updates and/or support might no longer be provided.
If the answer is ‘No!’ to one or more of the above questions, how about replacing your current solution with PATCH MANAGER, the comprehensive infrastructure management software solution?
PATCH MANAGER is an easy-to-use yet powerful solution specially designed for planning, documenting, and managing changes to the physical layer connectivity and assets of your data center, outside plant fiber network, office network and building infrastructure.
Let’s revisit the questions from the previous section, but this time, assessing PATCH MANAGER for managing your physical layer network infrastructure:
Is it well-suited to managing the complexity and diversity of networks in today’s world?
PATCH MANAGER is an enterprise-class application, capable of seamlessly scaling to support large global networks and large network teams, while still delivering high-quality performance and usability. The comprehensive configurability and powerful template-modeling ensure that the software evolves in line with your ever-changing organizational and network requirements.
Does it provide the features required to optimize your operational efficiency?
PATCH MANAGER provides a comprehensive Work Order system for managing your ‘Moves’, ‘Adds’ and ‘Changes’, with a wide array of features to seamlessly coordinate work across teams and projects.
The capabilities include highly customizable work flows that adapt to your work processes, fine-grained change management control that ensure complete accuracy of your data, and comprehensive auditing/reporting to give you full insight into the history of changes.
PATCH MANAGER’s policy-based user permissions guarantee complete control over the tasks and responsibilities of all users, ensuring that they remain within the scope of their job function.
Does it integrate seamlessly into your organization’s application architecture?
PATCH MANAGER provides an extensive REST API for system integration. These capabilities enable you to augment your infrastructure management system architecture with 3rd party solutions (such as network/service management systems and device discovery tools) and to integrate live data (such as SNMP data from PDUs) into the application.
Is it easy to operate and to on-board new users?
Simplicity-of-use is at the heart of the design of PATCH MANAGER. Not only can operators reply on the application for fulfilling its purpose, but they really like working with it! That is an important, and sometimes overlooked characteristic of a solution.
Does it even have long term vision/support?
PATCH MANAGER supports standard operating system, application server, database management and authentication platforms, seamlessly fitting into your organization’s application portfolio, without any additional requirements.
We regularly add new features and enhancements to our software. All updates are free, easy to implement, require no manual steps and are always FULLY compatible with your previous versions. No need to perform any data conversions to make use of the new features!
Operating since 2002, we are committed to product excellence and high-standard customer service and have a proven track record of longstanding and durable relationships with our customers and partners.
Read more: The story behind PATCH MANAGER
The nuts and bolts of replacing your current solution with PATCH MANAGER.
Migrating your current data and reports
PATCH MANAGER has a powerful data migration toolkit that safeguards against data loss from your current solution. PATCH MANAGER also prevents inconsistencies in your current data from being migrated, and due to PATCH MANAGER’s comprehensive and detailed data modeling, typically results in data enrichment after migration. PATCH MANAGER provides powerful reporting functionality to generate and customize engineering and management reports. Not only will you be able to recreate the reports from your existing solution, but a far broader scope of reporting will be possible.
Migrating your integrations
If your current solution is integrated with other systems within your organization, replacing and potentially enhancing these integrations is made straightforward by PATCH MANAGER’s comprehensive bi-directional REST API.
Getting up to speed
PATCH MANAGER is fully featured, architected on open standards, and designed to be powerful, yet easy to use. This allows you to take complete ownership of the application with minimal external assistance required. That said, our highly skilled team of consultants are happy to share their best-practice experience to help you along the way.
If you would like to know more about PATCH MANAGER, request a personal online demo with one of our representatives, take a look around our website or write us an email at info@patchmanager.com.
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