| | Siemens identifies WS_FTP Pro as the perfect tool to strengthen its global network of innovation
From mobile communications products to healthcare to financial services, Siemens broad product range is making major inroads in providing consumers with top-quality products and services. Its passion for innovation has kept Siemens at the top of its game with strong growth for the past few years.
This commitment to innovation has resulted in the UK-based company always striving to perfect its products and processes. For example, Siemens' telecommunications product support group identified a need to enable 600 support engineers to manage customers' telephone exchange equipment remotely from a PC-based platform. Among the key tasks the group needed to perform were maintenance and back up, upgrade, debugging of system software, as well as storing copies of system information at secure company sites.
Tom Nutkins, a senior support engineer, and Chris Holmes, an IS consultant, at Siemens were both tasked with finding an innovative solution to this problem. We identified FTP as the way for our support engineers to perform the tasks at hand, said Tom. Our organization first used a home-grown FTP utility that was Windows 3.1-based. When we upgraded our systems to Windows 9.x, our FTP utility was not upgraded. We needed to acquire another FTP tool that was Windows 9.x compliant and eventually would work with Windows 2000.
That's when they began looking at commercial FTP products as possible solutions. They evaluated several products including KEAterm and Procomm Plus. Both of these products are terminal emulators but also include an FTP utility as part of the product. Even though Siemens owned copies of these products, they found they could not easily accomplish what was needed.
As part of their evaluation process, Siemens purchased one copy of version 6.0 of WS_FTP Pro from Ipswitch, Inc. WS_FTP Pro is considered to be the most popular and functional FTP client for transferring files over the Internet with millions of users worldwide. It's a reliable, efficient, fast, and secure way to transfer files.
We found WS_FTP Pro to be very flexible and easy to customize, said Tom. Since it was so intuitive, it presented no need for training our users. WS_FTP Pro's interface was also very similar to the in-house FTP utility our users had utilized, which was an added benefit.
After evaluating WS_FTP Pro, Siemens knew they had found exactly the right tool. Siemens purchased 740 copies of version 7.0 of WS_FTP Pro in 2001?
WS_FTP Pro was simply the best-in-class FTP utility that enabled us to communicate with our remote equipment, said Chris Holmes. Version 7.0 delivered an even better interface than version 6 and it does exactly what we wanted. There haven't been any problems with the software and it requires no support from IT. In fact, we highly recommend WS_FTP Pro to other organizations within Siemens.
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