Silicon Valley, California - February 2, 2010 - Pingsta – the collaborative platform for Internet experts and Network-Expertise-in-the-Cloud™ service provider - today announced the launch of Virtual Private ICE™ (VPI), a subscription-based service that enables enterprises, IT service providers and Government agencies worldwide to enhance workforce collaboration, capture reusable knowledge and monetize excess intellectual capacity to generate new, green revenue streams.
The lack of a plug-and-play customer-workforce collaboration and knowledge capture platform hinders the agility and scalability of organizations, resulting in reduced productivity and increased operational costs. Furthermore, recent industry research shows that organizational workforce is underutilized leading to about US$1,000 worth of untapped excess intellectual capital going to waste every day per knowledgeable employee. Pingsta VPI™ provides clients with a quantifiable path to IT cost savings and revenue generation via a secure cloud-based platform. In addition, Pingsta VPI™ is fully customized with real-time connection features such as user task feeds, ongoing knowledge capture and validation tools, as well as the capacity to monetization excess intellectual capital.
“With Pingsta VPI, organizations worldwide can now create their own workforce-in-the-cloud platform across all industries and areas of expertise, enhance collaboration like never before and monetize all excess intellectual capital to generate a new differentiated revenue stream" said Deka Yussuf, VP of Marketing at Pingsta. "Imagine a scenario where Internet Service Provider A has a certain critical skill set in its VPI cloud that Internet Service Provider B requires urgently to roll out a new project. Rather than ISP B going out to hire engineers, it simply taps into ISP A's VPI cloud for the needed skill set on-demand and only pays per use."
"The opening up of our APIs to enable the integration of third-party corporate applications into the Pingsta VPI platform will greatly enhance the user-experience" added Tobi Knaup, Lead Software Architect at Pingsta.
Pingsta VPI™ is available in three editions:
Pingsta VPI™ is already drawing the attention of large IT service providers and enterprises with several pilots scheduled from Q1 2010. Check out Pingsta VPI™ page for more information.
About Pingsta
Pingsta is a collaborative platform for the world’s Internet experts. Pingsta - whose members include inventors, fellows, professors, distinguished engineers and technical leaders in over 50 countries - facilitates intellectual collaboration amongst the experts that invented and continue to sustain the various components that make up the Internet.
Through its Intellectual Commerce Ecosystem - Pingsta ICE™ - service offering, Pingsta enables Enterprises, IT Service Providers and Government agencies worldwide to leverage Network-Expertise-in-the-Cloud™ on a pay-per-use basis for break-fix technical support, consulting and R&D tasks while also enabling them to monetize the excess capacity of their current in-house global workforce.
Redwood City, CA - July 7, 2009 - Pingsta – the online collaborative platform for Internet experts and Network-Expertise-in-the-Cloud™ provider - today announced the launch of Pingsta Collaborative Asset Manager (Pingsta CAM™), a Pingsta ICE™ service feature that provides businesses of all sizes and Government agencies with asset management capabilities via an intelligent web-based world map mashup that enables customers to collaboratively upload, update and manage their IT assets across multiple locations worldwide in real-time.
With an intuitive user-interface, Pingsta CAM™ helps businesses manage IT assets such as routers, switches, firewalls, data center servers, storage and customer premise equipment. Pingsta CAM™ captures details such as asset type, manufacturer, serial number, software version and value, as well as topology diagrams, configuration files and photos. All added and updated assets are immediately searchable and visible organization-wide. Pingsta CAM™ is globally accessible via the web and requires no software download, setup nor maintenance.
"Typically, within most organizations, the team that procures and manages IT assets inventory and those that implement and operate them daily work in silos and exchange asset data via ad-hoc emails using out-of-date spreadsheets. With Pingsta CAM™, procurement, engineering, finance and indeed, the entire organization, enjoy an end-to-end visibility to the same asset data that is collaboratively updated" said Peter Alfred-Adekeye, CEO and founder of Pingsta. "In a highly competitive information-age, accessing accurate corporate asset data in real-time enhances service delivery and improves the balance sheet"
Pingsta CAM™ enhances the overall efficiency of asset inventory management by simplifying the way Pingsta ICE™ clients collect, maintain, search and share IT asset data. Its pay-per-asset pricing model allows customers to save costs and time while improving employee productivity.
About Pingsta
Pingsta is a collaborative platform for the world’s Internet experts. Pingsta - whose members include inventors, fellows, professors, distinguished engineers and technical leaders in over 50 countries - facilitates intellectual collaboration amongst the experts that invented and continue to sustain the various components that make up the Internet.
Through its Intellectual Commerce Ecosystem - Pingsta ICE™ - service offering, Pingsta enables Enterprises, IT Service Providers and Government agencies worldwide to leverage Network-Expertise-in-the-Cloud™ on a pay-per-use basis for break-fix technical support, consulting and R&D tasks while also enabling them to monetize the excess capacity of their current in-house global workforce.
Redwood City, CA - October 7, 2008- Pingsta - the online collaborative platform for internetwork experts - today launched ICE Pro™, an online subscription service that provides small and medium businesses with on-demand access to premium network engineering resources. Pingsta ICE Pro™ provides carrier-class consulting and break-fix operational support that helps businesses manage complex Internet Protocol technology, lower operational costs and increase productivity.
As small and medium businesses become more reliant on web-based applications to support their day-to-day operations, the network has become an essential resource for them. Pingsta ICE Pro™ represents a Network-Intelligence-as-a-Service model that enables fast-growing businesses to tap into an existing pool of expert-engineering talent, without the costs and distractions of owning and maintaining internal resources.
“In a climate where IT talent acquisition is a difficult and costly exercise, the need for an on-demand solution that provides complete network ownership and peace of mind to small businesses is paramount” said Deka Yussuf, VP of Business Development. “When people need electricity, they do not build a power plant to get it. They plug into the electricity grid through the socket on the wall and only pay per usage. Pingsta ICE Pro™ allows businesses to access network expertise in the same way.”
In order to save costs, small and medium businesses used to rely on ad-hoc relationships with consultants with very little networking experience to navigate through complex technologies. With ICE Pro™, a monthly subscription fee of $60 grants them the ability to purchase consulting and break-fix tasks as needed. These tasks are resolved by industry-expert engineers who specialize in a multitude of networking technologies, such as LAN, VPN and VoIP.
Some of the key features of ICEPro™ include:
Pingsta ICE Pro™ is currently available worldwide. Supported vendors include: Cisco, Juniper, Foundry, and Alcatel-Lucent.
About Pingsta
Pingsta is a collaborative platform for the world's Internet experts. Pingsta celebrates and facilitates social and intellectual collaboration amongst all the experts that invented and continue to sustain the various components that make up the Internet. Pingsta members include inventors, fellows, professors, distinguished engineers and technical leaders from over 50 countries.
Below is a summarized list of the historic events:
One of Pingsta's core objectives is to celebrate all those that have helped to create (and continue to sustain) the Internet. As such, It is with great pleasure that Pingsta hereby honors the following fifty extraordinary engineers by bestowing upon them the inaugural Pingsta Hall of Fame membership for their various contributions to the development of the Internet:
Please join Pingsta in saluting these exceptional individuals and their contribution to the development of mankind.
Sincerely
Peter Alfred-Adekeye
CEO, Pingsta
Online group seeks expert network engineers for consulting work - By Tim Greene
Network World , 04/24/2008
An elite social-networking site for network engineers is expanding into consulting on IT projects for businesses and service providers.
The site, Pingsta.com, has been in beta for about a year now, assembling a stable of about 500 networking professionals it deems worthy to be considered experts, says Deka Yussuf, marketing vice president for Pingsta.
The site is now testing a service called Pingsta ICE in which it pairs customers who need help on IT projects with qualified networking experts from among Pingsta.com members.
When requests come in for help, Pingsta's software sorts them and notifies members with the best qualifications. The first to respond wins the engagement. Customers pay pingsta.com, which takes a portion of the fee and pays the engineer who does the work.
Some work is done on a flat-fee basis, and other types are negotiated based on the size of the project, Yussuf says.
Initially, experts were selected by Pingsta staff and invited to join, but now the site lets interested parties submit résumés that are screened to determine whether applicants will be granted membership, Yussuf says.
Ronald Jean, a network engineer for Verizon Wireless, joined Pingsta recently after learning about it during a discussion on the business-networking site LinkedIn. He says he uses Pingsta as a way to discuss networking issues with other experts, learn about problems and bugs, and get a global perspective on the industry. "It seems to be a very powerful tool that will get more powerful as more people join," Jean says.
Current qualified experts hold industry certifications such as CCIE and JNCIE, and they are categorized based on this expertise and the types of gear they are qualified to work on. So far, Pingsta staff vets applicants. "But we want to get to the point where it's a self-regulated community," Yussuf says.
Each member is allowed to invite three other people to join. Most of the members work or have worked in service provider organizations, and many are retired. "This is a way for them to extend their intellectual legacies," she says. "Maybe they worked for 10 or 20 years at Cisco. What do they do now?"
From Pingsta's perspective, it runs a consulting service but doesn't have to pay salaries. "It's a very interesting model from the perspective of sales and marketing expenditure," Yussuf says.
The company is privately funded but is considering seeking venture capital, she says. It hopes later this year to have customer case studies it can make public.
The company was founded by CEO Peter Alfred-Adekeye, an engineer who has worked for Cisco, IBM Global Services and AT&T. He is also CEO of a service company called MultiVen specializing in network maintenance, operations and optimization that he started after leaving Cisco.
Alfred-Adekeye also in 2006 set up The African Network, an organization that promotes entrepreneurship in African and elsewhere by people of African descent.
REDWOOD CITY, Calif. - April 15, 2008 - Pingsta - a collaborative platform for the world's internetwork experts - today announced the launch of Pingsta ICE™, Pingsta's Intellectual Commerce Ecosystem. Pingsta ICE™ provides network equipment manufacturers, IT service providers and enterprises worldwide with the next-generation network engineering service-delivery engine on a per-task basis, for break-fix, consulting and research and development challenges. Pingsta ICE™ clients leverage Pingsta's coalesced intelligence to augment their in-house talent and surge engineering capacity at the push of a button - efficiently, transparently and cost effectively.
Over the past few years, network equipment manufacturers and IT service providers have struggled to acquire and retain the top talent needed to expedite new product and technology development as well as support services delivery cost-effectively and their previously adopted model of offshore outsourcing has failed to resolve this dilemma. Pingsta ICE™ provides a holistic solution to these challenges by allowing network equipment manufacturers and IT service providers to leverage Pingsta's global community of expert engineers transparently.
"Pingsta ICE™ is the logical answer to the human, intellectual and financial capital challenges facing the networking industry today" said Peter Alfred-Adekeye, CEO and founder of Pingsta. "With Pingsta ICE™, network equipment manufacturers and service providers reduce their operational expenditure without compromising expertise and customer satisfaction. Additionally, Pingsta ICE™ provides the entire telecommunication industry with the collaborative talent-on-tap model necessary to accelerate the pace of innovation required to build and sustain tomorrow's networking products efficiently."
"By creating an intellectual capital economy within the Pingsta community, Pingsta ICE™ provides network engineers with an unprecedented opportunity to monetize their knowledge, expand their technical horizon, and work from anywhere in the world, anytime" said John Baekelmans, Pingsta technical advisory board member.
Pingsta ICE™ has already signed up its first customer, Multiven - a leading global provider of premium network maintenance services - and has commenced worldwide customer executive briefings and demos.
<strogn>About Pingsta
Pingsta is a collaborative platform for the world's Internet experts. Pingsta facilitates unprecedented intellectual collaboration amongst all the experts that invented and continue to sustain the various components that make up the Internet. Pingsta members include inventors, fellows, professors, distinguished engineers and technical leaders from over 50 countries.</strogn>
Redwood City, CA - April 2, 2008 - Pingsta - the collaborative platform for the world's internetwork experts - today announced the launch of mySolvr - an openly-available repository of comprehensive, organized and validated internet infrastructure and application intelligence. Through the use of open collaboration, mySolvr aggregates re-usable intellectual capital that enables Internet Protocol network infrastructure and applications to function seamlessly irrespective of the underlying hardware, software or technology.
This multi-faceted knowledge base is designed to provide network engineers and end-users alike with concise validated internet infrastructure and application intelligence that will help them better plan, build, operate and optimize their networks which will improve the availability of the Internet as a whole.
"With the ongoing growth and pervasiveness of the Internet from the enterprise to the networked home, there is a need for an openly-available Internet knowledge-base that is comprehensive, organized and validated." said Peter Alfred-Adekeye, CEO and founder of Pingsta. "Every single day, enterprise networks and the Internet infrastructure experience preventable degradation and outages that impacts revenue, productivity and end-user experience negatively. MySolvr provides network engineers with a single platform to concisely document their best practices so the world can benefit from their collectively re-usable intellectual capital."
MySolvr is populated by Pingsta's expert members and a global audience of volunteer network and application engineers and enthusiasts. MySolvr entries are categorized into one of the following five knowledge bases:
MySolvr is aggregating content for all network equipment and application manufacturers worldwide including Cisco, Juniper, Motorola, Nortel, Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia, and Ericsson.
About Pingsta
Pingsta is an online collaborative platform for the world's Internet experts. Pingsta is facilitating unprecedented intellectual collaboration amongst all the experts that invented and continue to sustain the various components that make up the Internet. Pingsta members include inventors, fellows, professors, distinguished engineers and technical leaders from over 50 countries.
Pingsta and mySolvr are registered trademarks of Pingsta, Inc. All other trademarks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners.