Earlier this month, we released Axeda ServiceLink 5.2. This release was developed in close partnership with our customers to help solve their most pressing business challenges. 

This is my Top 5 list of the most important challenges we tackled with this latest version:

1. IPv6 Support - All US Government agencies must have IPv6 compatible networks this year. Axeda products now support the IPv6 network layer protocol, enabling manufactures to provide remote service to government customers. 

2. Screen Sharing Performance - To provide the highest level of service and meet customer SLAs, our customers demand that the screen sharing application be fast - not only for screen refresh rates, but also for an engineer to start a session.  This version shows as much as 5x improvement, which increases support productivity.

3. Dual Monitor Support - Access to devices with dual monitor displays on Microsoft Vista and Linux is critical.  Support for Vista has become even more important as we quickly approach the currently published end date of availability of Microsoft's XP operating system: June 30, 2008.  Axeda Desktop provides this support, which helps speed user adoption.  

4. Large File Transfers - Customers need an efficient and reliable way to upload 15-20GB files from a device for troubleshooting and analysis.  Today, our customers are getting these files a couple of ways, either by FTP and hoping there are no network hiccups during 20+ hour transfer which will require a restart from scratch, or ask their customer to burn the file to multiple DVDs and snail mail the DVDs.  With this latest release over 20 GB of core dumps can be securely transferred back to the enterprise server.  These file transfers can be paused and resumed, without losing data already sent - allowing for a significant reduction in time to issue resolution.

5. Useful Reporting.  Each customer wants to be able to create, organize and format a report or dashboard with their own parameters, filters and deliver it either as a PDF, CSV or HTML in an email to an individual or a group. With this release, it is even easier to quickly create impactful reports and dashboards to support SLAs and internal ROI.  It is also easy to create compliance reports for an entire device population to understand the status of the deployment of a software update.

As a product manager, one of the main criteria I use for measuring the success of a product or feature is rate of adoption by customers.  Axeda ServiceLink 5 was released last June and about half of our customers are either in production, or soon will be in production. This seems like validation that we are building the right solutions!