Uplogix Founder and Vice President of Product Strategy James Dollar said he wants his company’s solutions to reach across both the geographical and business vertical maps. The company, which identifies itself as an independent network management platform that is located with and directly connected to managed devices, designs its solutions to both work stand-alone and augment existing centralized management tools providing the configuration, performance and security management automation functions that are most often performed locally.
   For oil and gas companies, having a competent satellite and terrestrial network management system translates to huge savings in operational costs. This is twice as important for companies that work both on and offshore. In describing how important the satellite element is to his business, Dollar explained that Uplogix has a big play satellite and mostly in oil and gas and government sectors.
   “Providing reduced operational costs are the most critical benefit of our solution,” said Dollar. “With such a variety in customers, we absolutely have to be open to customizing and adapting our solutions for different markets. We provide a customizable best practice rule set and driver system that work with satellite industry gear from the iDirects and the Comtechs of the world. We work on everything from the radios down to the antenna controllers from people like C-Com and the IP networking gear from companies like Cisco and Juniper. Those best practice rule sets are determined by the manufacturer views on the most efficient way to fix the problem. When you apply those same systems to those in the oil and gas sector to the military, they would have a very different way of solving problems.”
   Uplogix technology traditionally plays a lot of different roles in the area of network recovery – from security provider to network technician. The company’s appliance racks in same gear with other satellite and terrestrial communication gear. Dollar said that though having to deploy a set of human hands to a remote location to deal with a problem is a last resort, the company is able to adapt to this difficult scenario. “If we have to escalate to using a set of remote hands, we can provide valuable tools to accomplish the recovery steps. We can do everything from build a system entirely from scratch to troubleshooting with specific components,” he said.
   Though Uplogix’s business is split equally between about domestic and international markets, its customer needs generally don’t change between regions in the satellite space, though Dollar notes that Arab countries tend to want to use their own satellites and frequencies to keep all communication over their region.
   “Most of the rest of the world works the same,” said Dollar. “Most of our customers in the satellite realm are service providers that are already global and they don’t want a different solution for different regions. They want to maintain a single support environment. They want the same product deployed to all areas and regions of their businesses.”
   The Uplogix system uses non-traditional or non-production networks to both relay information back to operation centers and to provide a two-way path for escalation of recovery tasks to the next level. If several other tasks don’t work, Dollar said the company could bring up an alternate satellite or cellular landline connection and then provide low-level data as the tools to support actions. “This is all in the world of recovering outages,” said Dollar. “Any viable management system in the new architecture must have the ability to function independently of the network and bring a strong focus on ensuring network performance and availability while also providing the server management functions that are best performed locally by a local platform.”