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AKIPS and Educational Customers Connect at EDUCAUSE 2024

Written by Michael Suvorovs

One of the great benefits of an industry conference is the opportunity to put a face to a name, and that’s what happened for the AKIPS team and our customers in the higher education space for several highly engaging days at EDUCAUSE 2024.

Held from Oct. 21-24 in San Antonio, Texas, EDUCAUSE (#EDU24 on social media) brought together education tech professionals and software vendors. EDUCAUSE was abounded with opportunities for networking, sharing best practices, professional growth, relationship building, and problem solving. Throughout the event, my AKIPS team members and I had meaningful interactions with customers and attendees, deepening existing relationships and forging new ones. It was fantastic!

Customers and potential customers visited our AKIPS booth and we learned about their existing network monitoring challenges and upcoming projects they are looking to undertake in the months and years ahead. These ranged from network monitoring to network segmentation, regulatory compliance, network mapping, and more. 

Seeing Is Believing

While speaking with customers over the phone or Zoom is valuable, there is nothing that beats in-person communication and dialog. We loved demoing AKIPS use cases and outcomes  at the booth and watched our customer’s their facial expressions turn from doubt to awe as they realized the speed of AKIPS and the value it can bring. 

Indeed, a potential customers who had not previously heard of AKIPS mentioned how much easier deploying AKIPS would be, and how much more lightweight AKIPS is compared to their current technology. The individual was so excited to learn that the AKIPS offerings ran on just one virtual machine, which they said would be “so much easier than the three or four” their current vendor makes them spin up.

The head of networking at a major university came by the booth along with a network engineer from the university and they were wowed, with the networking chief saying, “You had me at PEARL” to express their love of the AKIPS approach to coding. The network engineer at first said they “would having to do” with what was being shown in the demo, but then they enthusiastically jumped and said, “Wait, I do care about this—and that!”

Overall, the event affirmed that much of our AKIPS product roadmap aligns with what higher education customers want. We were also able to connect directly with customers and prospective customers and learn about “must have” features and insights that will lead to deeper exploration, particularly in the areas of systems and compliance. All of the interaction that we had ensured we were on our toes and learning from the EDUCASE audinece and our awesome customers.

A Special Shout Out

One special highlight of EDUCAUSE was the full-day preconference Higher Education NetComm Workshop on Oct. 21, which was a great opportunity for conference attendees to learn about the latest advancements in network technology specifically for higher education institutions. The workshop was a fantastic opportunity to strengthen connections with existing customers.

During the event our friend and customer Ryan Turner, director of network at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, gave a direct shout out to the benefits of AKIPS solutions. AKIPS has partnered closely with Turner and UNC Chapel Hill in the past, and has been able to deliver a scalable solution that delivers network insights at a high level of granularity and streamlines network troubleshooting across a large and complex environment.

AKIPS' Team - Educause 2024

Working with AKIPS has allowed UNC Chapel Hill to dramatically reduce the time required to isolate and resolve network outages, fulfilling its promise to decrease Mean Time to Detect and Mean Time to Repair. Although we didn’t ask Ryan to endorse us, we are grateful for his open endorsement at the NetComm Workshop. It was extremely validating for the AKIPS team, and we are proud of our partnership.

Making the Grade

At EDUCAUSE, the AKIPS team and I were able to connect with customers and demonstrate to all attendees that not only do we get the unique network monitoring and management needs of higher education, but we also have the tools, technology, and functionality to solve those issues.

It was gratifying to see attendees bring their colleagues over to the booth to gets to show them how AKIPS tools can get to the root of network issues in real-time by filtering the “noise” and analyzing all network data (HTML and beyond) without relying on long-term staff institutional knowledge. 

However, if you spent the week at #EDU24, I hope it was productive, informative, and fun. I and the AKIPS team look forward to seeing you at next year’s conference in Nashville!  

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