Brewery Toasts Ipswitch WhatsUp

Published 24th February 2006

Ipswitch Inc., the leading developer of network management, messaging and file transfer solutions, today announced that Hall and Woodhouse is using Ipswitch WhatsUp Professional to remotely access and monitor its network of PCs throughout the UK.

With a turnover approaching £90m and with over 2,000 employees, Hall and Woodhouse is an independent family brewer that operates public houses throughout the south of England and sells its beer nationally. The brewer is responsible for Badger and Tanglefoot, two of the most popular real ales in the UK, with Badger First Gold recently winning World Champion ale at the Brewing Industry International Awards.

Two years ago, the company decided to roll out ADSL connections to its managed pubs, so needed to be able to make sure that any connectivity issues were recognised and dealt with rapidly. Hall and Woodhouse wanted to be able to remotely access PCs scattered over the large geographical area of the group from a central location, negating the need for separate network engineers at each of the managed sites.

"We aim to grow as an independent family company, becoming the top regional brewer in the South and developing a 'World Class' drinks business," explained Hall and Woodhouse IT Development Manager Garry Rees. "Good internal communication and the ability to rapidly deploy menus, documents and emails are vital to achieve this goal."

Rees realised the need for a stable network monitoring solution for him to be able to actively track the many points on the Hall and Woodhouse network and turned to Ipswitch WhatsUp Professional for a solution.
"I wanted to have a clear and visible understanding of the status of the connection at every pub at a glance," explained Garry, who has a screen on his desk dedicated to an Ipswitch WhatsUp display of its managed pubs. "Ipswitch WhatsUp provides me with this visibility and also alerts me via email when a connection is down for any reason."

WhatsUp Professional is Ipswitch's popular network management and application management solution, offering extraordinary ease of use and providing high levels of scalability, usability and extensibility. Ipswitch WhatsUp Professional provides users with a simple out-of-box experience and immediate return on their network monitoring investment.

If a problem occurs, the icon for the device - whether it is a router, server or PC - changes from green to red so that a further investigation can be initiated. Ipswitch WhatsUp then allows the administrator to gain historical data on each device. "This is probably the most useful feature of Ipswitch WhatsUp as I can see exactly what time a problem started and how often connectivity has been lost," added Garry. "Put simply, it eliminates the guesswork."

Since implementing Ipswitch WhatsUp, Hall and Woodhouse now gains a rapid identification of problems with the network. "The software allows me to immediately start diagnostics and identify whether hardware needs replacing or if a connection is down," concluded Garry. "Thanks to Ipswitch WhatsUp, all I need to do my job is in one place, on one screen. This saves us both time and money."





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