Hi Bruno,

It is not so much about vision, but a matter of where we invest our development capacity and how much value we can deliver to our users.

We would love to further expand the Monitoring App with all the existing features and capabilities of the Cube desktop client, but that would of course consume a considerable portion of our development capacity. And we choose to focus in the first place on other development that adds more value, like the Dashboard App for example (i.e. to enable things that cannot be done in Cube). And for the Monitoring App we focused on providing everything the day-to-day fault & performance management users need (i.e. the non-admin / non-designer users). Or the more casual users I would say, and having the more professional users (i.e. people who’s job is really working with DataMiner day in day out) leveraging the Cube desktop client.

And I know I’m going to say something where different people may have different opinions, which I respect, but I personally also still have the feeling that intensive users always still lean towards a desktop client, if they have the choice. The MS Office suite for example: applications like Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, Excel are all available both as web app and desktop app. And while they are even a closer match in terms of features and capabilities (as compared to putting our Cube desktop client next to the Monitoring App), most people that use those intensively lean towards using the desktop app. Again, that’s a rather personal observation, I’m sure that there are plenty of people that may have stopped using the MS Office desktop applications as well who are itching to jump in now ;-).

So in short. It’s not really a vision or so, but rather simply about how can we deliver maximum value with our development capacity (i.e. how much value is there in being able to use the Monitoring App to also edit Alarm Templates for example, versus using that development capacity to build cool new capabilities like our GQI, node edge and all of that).

Note also that while I reference the Dashboards App here as an example of a more valuable investment, there’s more things to come. One is our capability to enable you to build highly customized web Apps (without coding) on your own. That will enable you to build very targeted web apps for the different user groups, which will be very easy to use, tailored to their specific needs (rather than having to explain them where to go in the Monitoring App or Cube to find the information that is relevant for them, amongst all the many other things managed by DataMiner, which are irrelevant to them).

But feel free to share your thoughts if you feel different about this.

PS: if you are running Cube still in IE, I really recommend to start using it as a desktop client. The new extension to it (initially referenced as Cube Launcher, which is in fact now an integral part of what we call DataMiner Cube) gives a great user experience. I personally really love it.