2007 has been a busy year for us at SolarWinds, and I’m sure you are aware that we have grown a lot in the past 12 months. That’s really exciting for us, because it means that our products are solving more problems for more companies. Along with this growth have come some challenges and changes that you might not be aware of, so I wanted to take a moment to fill you in on what we have been doing behind the scenes in the product development and technical support teams.
This year we split the support and development teams apart and increased the size of both teams, but we also kept them connected by implementing a real-time escalation process, so that if any of our support reps are not able to solve your problem quickly, they can escalate it to the development team and someone from that team will jump in and help out. So while you may not be talking directly to a developer, you do have access through the support reps to the entire software development team at SolarWinds.
We have hired a lot of new people in the support team this year to keep up with the growth in both number of customers and the number of products and new features we are adding. All of our new support reps have networking and IT backgrounds, and while they may not know the solution to every problem, they do care deeply about helping you resolve your issues in the shortest time possible, and they have access to the most technical resources here at SolarWinds when needed to help them determine the answer.
The other thing we did in 2007 was to invest in the Thwack user community. Not just by organizing the community content and adding new features to the community itself, but by making sure our product managers and software development leads regularly participate in the discussion forums and answer questions about our products and future plans. We added a dedicated moderator who spends 100% of his time making sure that questions and comments posted to the community forums are addressed quickly and correctly.
Best wishes and happy holidays!