Nothing New Under the Sun

by Brenda J. Christie

A recent Business Insider article by Becky Peterson, tells the story of a Ghanaian immigrant who came to America and struck it rich.

Given the unfortunate events of recent days vis-a-vis the purported state of Haiti and African countries in general, it is refreshing to see another success story disproving that conjecture.  Abe Ankumah's story is also proof that with preparation, insight and grit, one can accomplish one's dreams.  Of course, there is a lot more to achieving success than the aforementioned.  If you have an interest in how entrepreneurs attained success, you may want to tune into a new MSNBC series about tech, jobs and the future.

What struck me about Becky Peterson's article, however, was not just because it is a success story, but the technology being employed.  The company Abe Ankumah and his two partners created, Nyansa, combines analytics with monitoring on wifi networks.  Voyance, the product Nysana recently released, "is a system that monitors wifi networks to make sure every device on the network is running perfectly."  This is an old concept applied to modern technology.  Which isn't to say it has no value.  Indeed, just the contrary.  Nysana recently secured $15 million in funding from Intel.  Companies who are Nysana's clients include:

• Tesla
• Proctor & Gamble
• General Motors
• Home Depot
• Uber

What's interesting about the concept of monitoring is that it has existed within the mainframe world for decades.  Mainframe shops, first, to a large degree, employed system programmers to monitor performance of hardware systems and subsystems accounting for high levels of mainframe availability.  Today, enterprise software such as IBM Omegamon, BMC MainView and CA Sysview,  largely performs these functions. So the idea of hardware monitoring is not new, but applied to a different platform - iOT devices running in a wifi, networked environment.

It would be interesting to know whether today's mainframe enterprise monitoring software incorporate analytics into the software.  Indeed, it would be interesting if we owe the whole existence of analytics to the mainframe.

In any event, the combination of system/subsystem monitoring for networks supporting wifi devices and analytics is very powerful.  Its use will undoubtedly be expanded from manufacturing and the healthcare industries in the coming years.

Kudos to Mr. Ankumah and his team!