25 Years of SolarWinds: Reflecting on Progress and Partnership

Now this hit me as hard as my first born coming to me a few weeks ago explaining how her Uncle had told her it was my duty to buy her first car for her (I have clarified this since and reminded her not to listen to anything her Uncle says); SolarWinds is 25 years old!

In reaching this significant milestone, we at Prosperon are proud to jointly celebrate this achievement together, reflecting on our 18 year long partnership of shared success and strong memories.

I first got exposed to SolarWinds when I joined an IT distribution company, who had just signed up to sell the SolarWinds products (all two of them at this time) in the UK. This was at the end of 2001 when the first SolarWinds Orion network monitoring application was released.

A true ground floor start up, which began with Don Yonce sharing with colleagues simple network tools; Ping Sweep and Traceroute, which soon turned in to a small business as more and more network engineers heard about and wanted these tools.  With the success of these mini networking applications and these being packed in to the Engineers Toolset, a new wave of web based applications were being developed.  SolarWinds releasing their ubiquitous Orion Network Performance Monitor solution was the start of something BIG!

Within a few short years, the progression of SolarWinds and the industry adoption of their monitoring platform led myself and Prosperon co-founders Matt Crane and Kathie O’Donoghue to start up a business focusing on this firebrand, which was disrupting the market with their quick to install, setup and purchase offering.

Our first year as Prosperon was spent sharing a back of the garage store room, with what seemed like families of spiders and other assorted creepy crawlies. As SolarWinds grew, so did we, as more organisations joined the ranks of customers who needed to understand how their networks were working, or when not working, where and why.

Anyone that has been in IT for this length of time, can often reflect on the various points in time that underwent rapid transformation, which for SolarWinds and ourselves has meant keeping on top of such changes. SolarWinds has consistently been at the cutting edge, adapting to new challenges and opportunities. As a close partner, Prosperon has been there every step of the way, taking what SolarWinds develop and taking to our clients so they benefit from the latest advancements in IT management technology and how this keeps pace with such cadence of change.

From a single person, creating a homegrown solution to common networking issues, to a market leading network monitoring, system monitoring, application monitoring, database monitoring, cloud monitoring, network management, security, ITSM, ITOM, AD management (pause while I check I have remembered everything in the portfolio!), SolarWinds has been an incredible success story.

We feel privileged to have been part of this shared journey and proud of what we have achieved both individually of each other and together. Having lived through global financial crisis, market changes, security breaches, leadership changes, we are as excited now on what the future holds as we did when we sold our first license as Prosperon Networks Ltd.

Happy Birthday SolarWinds, what a 25 years it has been!