Q&A with Barry Cummings, InteropNet Help Desk Lead

July 23rd, 2008 by Louis DiMeglio

During Interop New York 2008 Hot Stage I had the opportunity to sit down with Barry Cummings, the team lead for the InteropNet Help Desk to talk to him about his experiences with Interop and EM7.

ScienceLogic: What’s your real job when you’re not here?

Cummings: I’m a consultant. I have a networking services company through which I offer services all the way from Layer 1 to desktop support.

ScienceLogic: How long have you been involved with Interop?

Cummings: I attended my first show in 1996. I volunteered for my first shown in 1999 and haven’t missed a year since.

ScienceLogic: What makes you want to come back each year for the additional punishment?

Cummings: Working with the team, which are long-term established friendships at this point. That and the excitement of working with the new technologies as they or even before they come out.

ScienceLogic: In Las Vegas you were Team Lead for Help Desk. What are you going be doing in NY?

Cummings: Same thing. That position incorporates some management over the show floor and off-show floor area. That’s kinda where they put me and I’ve been doing it solidly for about 5 years.

ScienceLogic: What are the biggest changes you’ve seen in the show over the years, what sticks out?

Cummings: The amount of monitoring that we have and what we do with it has really been changing. We went from more, to almost none and now back to more. We’ve been through numerous vendors and apps over the years and until recently weren’t overly happy.

ScienceLogic: Did the integration between Service Desk and Monitoring that ScienceLogic created help streamline things in a meaningful manner?

Cummings: Absolutely. In the short time that we have to get things setup there’s no way to integrate multiple products in this area. Having things pre-integrated allowed us to quickly link network events and the related tickets together in the management system [EM7].

ScienceLogic: Moving forward on the Service Desk, do you think you can move away from your current paper driven process to a completely paperless process?

Cummings: I could potentially see it changing as we get the process down and fine tune it. We might be able to get an electronic interface for people. It’s tough. There’s always going to be an aspect of the shows we have to hand off on paper and get to legacy people such as electricians and movers.

ScienceLogic: If there was one thing you could improve that you think would make the overall show or help desk operate better, what would it be?

Cummings: We need to keep refining processes down to get information into EM7. Get better at using the integration and automation that already exists in EM7.

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July 23rd, 2008