The SAGE Outstanding Achievement Award 2006

Ladies and Gentlemen

please find enclosed the press release about the

 	SAGE Outstanding Achievement Award 2006

to Tobias Oetiker, author of the popular OSS tools MRTG, RRDtool and
SmokePing.

Please don't hesitate to contact me with any questions.

Best regards,
Fritz Zaucker

-- 
Oetiker+Partner AG		tel: +41 62 213 9903 (office)
Fritz Zaucker                        +41 79 675 0630 (mobile)
Aarweg 15                       fax: +41 62 213 9905
CH-4600 Olten                   web: www.oetiker.ch
PRESS RELEASE

 

Contact:

Fritz Zaucker

Phone: +41 62 213 9903

Fax:   +41 62 213 9905

eMail: fritz.zaucker@oetiker.ch





6.12.2006

Ref. Sage2006 / fz-oe



Swiss Open Source Software Developer receives

SAGE Outstanding Achievement Award ...



"... for creating tools that enabled system and network administration 

to mature from reactive to a proactive practice."



FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:



Wednesday, December 6th, 2006, Washington DC



The Swiss Open Source Software developer Tobias Oetiker together with

Dave Rand receives the 2006 SAGE Outstanding Achievement Award for the

creation of the Open Source Software tools MRTG and RRDtool. In their

commendation, SAGE points out:



  "Before the creation of these tools, the only people that could reap

  the benefits of long-term, historical statistics gathering were

  people with multimillion dollar budgets. MRTG and RRDtool

  democratized, and therefore popularized, historical data

  collection. As a result, network utilization planning has gone from

  being guesswork to a fine art. These tools have also been leveraged

  to track a wide array of resources ranging from disk I/O stats to

  CPU and memory usage to license server data.



  Thanks to Tobias, Dave, and their team, system and network

  administrators are no longer limited to fire-fighting when our

  resources are overloaded.  We can now easily access network and

  system data in an intuitive form to predict and plan for upgrades

  months in advance."



The award ceremony took place today, 6th December 2006 at the opening

session of the 20th Conference on Large Installation System

Administration (LISA) at Washington DC.



For more information about previous award recipients visit

http://www.sage.org/about/outstanding.html (not updated for 2006 yet).



About MRTG, RRDtool, SmokePing

------------------------------



MRTG and RRDtool are freely (as in freedom and in free beer) available

software tools for the collection and graphical display of time series

data and are mainly deployed to monitor computer networks and network

traffic. These programs are installed at hundred thousands of sites

world wide, monitoring everything from small local networks to large

IT infrastructures of internationally operating telecom

providers. SmokePing, another member of the family of tools developed

by Tobias Oetiker is used for the measurement and display of line

quality parameters in internet connections.



For more information about MRTG, RRDtool and SmokePing visit

http://oss.oetiker.ch




About Tobias Oetiker

--------------------

Tobias Oetiker recently started working for OETIKER+PARTNER AG

specializing in system management services and the continued

development of his open source tools MRTG, RRDtool and SmokePing.  For

more information about Tobias visit http://tobi.oetiker.ch




About OETIKER+PARTNER AG

------------------------

Oetiker+Partner AG is a Swiss consultancy company and service provider

based in Olten specializing in personal and organizational

development, management and information technology.  For more

information about OETIKER+PARTNER AG visit http://www.oetiker.ch




About SAGE and Usenix

---------------------



SAGE, The System Administrators Guild, is an international membership

society and a special interest group of the USENIX Association. It is

organized to advance the status of computer system administration as a

profession; establish standards of professional excellence and

recognize those who attain them; develop guidelines for improving the

technical and managerial capabilities of members of the profession;

and promote activities that advance the state of the art or the

community.



Since 1975, the USENIX Association has brought together the community

of engineers, system administrators, scientists, and technicians

working on the cutting edge of the computing world.



For more information about SAGE, visit http://www.sage.org. 

For more information about USENIX, visit http://www.usenix.org.




Contact:

Fritz Zaucker

OETIKER+PARTNER AG

Phone: +41 62 213 9903

Fax:   +41 62 213 9905

eMail: fritz.zaucker@oetiker.ch

Since I learned last week, that I am going
to receive the SAGE Outstanding
Achievement Award today, I have been
thinking about how to explain this to my
non-geek friends. Is it more of an oscar
for computer specialists or rather a
noble price for system administrators?

In any event I am happy and greatful to
receive this award. I would also like to
extend my thanks to all the users and
contributors to these tools who have made
them such a success over the years.
Especially to Dave Rand whos contributions
got me back into working on MRTG back in
1996.

In September I have finally quit my job at
the University. I am now working in my own
company specialising in system management
and network monitoring. I am also at the moment
talking to several parties who are
interested in sponsoring MRTG and RRDtool
development.

I am confident that I will soon have more
time to spend on improving and enhancing the
tools than ever before. In other words, the
award comes exactly at the right moment.
Thank you very much !