SME-focused specialist in network management software, Ipswitch, has announced a partnership in South Africa with Coast Software, which aims to extend the reach of its platform to include Web sites.

African distributor of the Ipswitch range, ATS Network Management, believes that this cooperation will take the range of its management solution to a higher level, extending its portfolio to include management of business-critical Web pages and applications.

Comments Glenn Lazarus of ATS: "The partnership with Coast Software integrates a whole new level of management into our solution set. We are now able to offer a solution stretching across the entire environment, right out to monitoring Web sites and checking their performance, from a single interface."

This Web monitoring tool is designed to feed information back to the Ipswitch WhatsUp management suite, a platform said to be suitable for monitoring networks of all sizes. Although priced at an SME level, WhatsUp is used by ATS and its customers on enterprise networks across the country, Lazarus adds.

"Sixty percent of our customer base already runs an enterprise management platform. WhatsUp plugs right in and becomes the first line of alerting in the case of any problems. The platform is also used extensively for fine-tuning and optimizing the flow of traffic across the network, all part of the primary aim of providing a proactive management solution," he states.

The first major update of the current WhatsUp suite was also released in the first months of this year, aiming to bring new functionality to the software package. WhatsUp Professional Service Pack 1 introduced active discovery for automatic updating of an evolving infrastructure, the ability to apply group changes to devices, and a Web interface which is both more robust and secure, he concludes.