Publishing the blogs of technology leaders and connecting them to a large audience of industry decision makers.
VP Product Management, Co-Founder, Coradiant
Alistair leads Coradiant’s award-winning product team. Alistair co-founded Networkshop, the network infrastructure-consulting firm from which Coradiant was formed. In addition to his duties with Coradiant, Alistair is a prolific writer and speaker in the networking industry. He continues to work closely with several of the leading conferences and tradeshows on curriculum and content, including as a member of the program committee of Networld+Interop. Alistair has worked for companies such as 3Com Corporation, Primary Access, and Eicon Technology. He has managed and consulted on a range of technologies including VPNs, QOS, access concentration, high availability, server performance and collocated security. He is the co-author of Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS Across Enterprise Networks (Prentice Hall PTR, 1999). Alistair graduated from Dalhousie University with a B.Com (Hon.) in strategic marketing.
November 16, 2006
Data Management
Folks are getting up early this morning to join us in Boston for our first user group meeting. Some of the Coradiant product team had sushi with early arrivals from a couple of companies; I was struck by how weird it is to have a conversation with someone about TrueSight or the future of...
November 13, 2006
Data Management
One of the hot topics for many of our customers is using Real User Monitoring to measure the impact of a change. There are plenty of changes that sites experience every day, from new content or new code to modifications to routing or end-user browsers. (Hey look! All your customers just switched to Firefox beta...
November 12, 2006
Data Management
I’m psyched. We’re launching the Coradiant User Group this week, with our 2006 East Coast summit in Boston.When we set out to organize the event, we expected less than 20 people. After all, it’s near the holidays, and everyone’s busy with the end of the fiscal year. So when we blew past 40 respondents, we...
October 10, 2006
Data Management / performance theory / technology
A few years ago, before the days of TrueSight, Coradiant used to be in the managed services business. This gave us lots of hands-on experience and a good deal of opportunity to see vendors from the customer’s perspective. We try to put that background into our products—lots of debates around technical issues are resolved...
August 15, 2006
Data Management / performance theory / technology / webops
We use the term Real User Monitoring to explain what Coradiant’s technology does. The term sounds a bit nebulous, but it does the job. Of course, there are lots of people who think they do real user monitoring; so I’m going to try and explain the differences between us and some of the distinctions.Synthetic testsFirst...
June 14, 2006
Data Management / webops
In traditional IT environments, silos of domain expertise focus on the atomic elements that perform some kind of business function. These include the client; the WAN/network, the data center, the application cluster, and the back-end systems.The network and data center tiers are often represented by clouds (particularly when drawn by those whose responsibilities do...
June 14, 2006
Data Management / technology
I often hear people say, “the website was down.” Not only is it usually wrong; it’s also completely uninformative.Look at the statement a bit. And look at what it doesn’t tell you.The web: What part of the web? The whole site? Or just the part you were trying to use? Most companies split their websites...
June 14, 2006
Data Management / politics
Let’s define the two camps.The operations teams are responsible for keeping things running. Their view is that change is the leading cause of problems. A support team member I know has a big sign marked, “What Changed?” on his wall as a constant reminder of this.The engineering teams like change. They’re the agents of change....
June 14, 2006
Data Management / performance theory
I spend a lot of time (more than I probably should) discussing performance with people. And often, disputes are the result of disagreement in terms. Armed with a common syntax, adversaries can often find common ground.There are four main dimensions that I’ve found useful in describing performance metrics. These include whether the...
June 14, 2006
Data Management / standards
The Change Management Database (CMDB) is a map of the components in an IT environment and how they depend on one another. It’s at the core of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), a set of best practices developed by the UK government and broadly adopted in recent years.Even if you’re not an ITIL shop...