You can’t really be in the networking industry without hearing about Solarwinds. Their IT management and monitoring products are very widely used. Nearly every customer I’ve worked with is using Solarwinds’ tools to some extent, whether it’s the ever-popular Orion NCM for network management and monitoring, or the slew of free tools that Solarwinds makes available for little troubleshooting or configuration tasks.

Solarwinds has supported NFD for quite some time. At NFD5, they presented on quite a few things. Of note was their presentation updating us on existing products, as well as the discussion about Solarwinds’ free tools arsenal.

I’m hoping that this time they’re ready to talk a little more about SDN and network virtualization. They have a lot of great products that warrant some discussion, but I’d like to see more of what they’re doing to answer the new wave of SDN-y products that are coming out.  I’d also like to hear more about how they’re streamlining and simplifying their existing software.