Company’s New Up-Time Service Seems To Just Keep Up With Industry Joneses
February 6, 2012 by Dave Haynes
Retail marketing agency/digital signage software vendor and consultancy John Ryan has announced the launch of a bank-centric digital signage monitoring application designed to maximize up-time. The company is calling its service very different, but apart from the technical details about how things happen, I’m not sure what’s actually distinct here from what’s pretty common among serious digital signage software vendors.
Says the release:
The solution ensures optimal digital signage uptime through continuous system monitoring, rapid identification of network issues and automatic fault resolution. While the system was designed primarily to deal with screen issues, it can also monitor and automatically fix other system components, such as onsite player PCs.
Like lots of other solutions.
The new, patent-pending Monitoring Service is engineered specifically for large-scale networks. Most screen monitoring systems use a sequential polling approach, in which each component reports its status one at a time. This means that large networks may take a full day to poll, leading to poor assurance of network health. John Ryan’s service is differentiated by its ability to simultaneously poll the status of components across the network, providing banks with a constantly updated picture of network health while facilitating the identification and resolution of problems as soon as they arise.
I’ve seen systems that poll in real time or darn near.
The system operates locally, only centrally reporting faults that cannot be immediately corrected. This is in contrast to systems that provide full status reports on each on-site component, necessitating a laborious review of results to identify those components which are reporting faults.
Lots of systems do exception-based reporting that focuses quickly on the little that’s wrong, as opposed to the most that’s OK.
“Digital signage is rapidly becoming a critical bank-marketing tool. For this reason, ability to ensure system uptime is becoming increasingly important,” said Gary Madgwick, chief technology officer for John Ryan. “Recent client feedback and proposals from banks motivated us to create a monitoring service that can proactively manage large-scale, secure networks.”
Well I won’t argue that up-time is important, but I’d debate the idea it’s only increasingly so. When was up-time not important???
Undoubtedly, there are things that are being done here that are hair-splittingly different than the way other vendors do it. But on balance, this seems a bit like a software vendor announcing it can run one video after another in a schedule. If you can’t monitor and manage what’s in the field, you’re not really even in the game.
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