In a world where “New!” may be the most powerful word in the marketing vocabulary, there are advantages to technologies that had their origins a while ago and have incrementally improved over the years. To me, BigFix is a case in point.
BigFix was born in the late 1990’s and tailored for the computing resource environments of that time. If I recall 1999 or so correctly, 400 MHz was a blazing clock speed, 64 MBytes was a generous memory, and 8 Gigabytes qualified as a cavernous disk drive. In terms of connectivity, 10 MBit/Sec Ethernet was standard in most enterprises, but almost everyone else connected to the Internet via a 56K modem.
The original design objectives for BigFix was to provide a mechanism for worldwide system status reporting and content distribution that would tread as lightly as possible on available computing resources. The last thing anyone wanted was to have the visibility and service delivery tail wag the host computer dog. From there, BigFix’s architects kept the BigFix Agent small (then 1-2 megabytes), and able to be throttled so as not to degrade end user experience. The designers also took care to build in features that would enable BigFix management communications over almost any wide area connection–from the plainest of POTS connections, to high-bandwidth fibreoptics.
The minor miracle here is that BigFix started small and has stayed that way. The BigFix Agent might have added some heft (currently somewhere between 4-6 MBytes), but still sips rather than guzzles system RAM. In fact the percentage of RAM occupied by the agent has shrunk to the neighborhood of 0.1 percent of a typical PC, Mac, or laptop environment. Likewise, administrators can throttle Agent operations to conserve processing bandwidth and generally not get in the way of end users acting productively. Many customers, in particularly in retail and hospitality industries and those whose global networks extend into less developed parts of the world, highly value the fact that we never came close to discontinuing support for narrow bandwidth connections.
There’s an old saying in Silicon Valley that Intel giveth and Microsoft taketh away. BigFix is one company, however, that has never regarded Moore’s Law and its corollaries as a license to consume mass quantities of memory, processing power, or network bandwidth. Staying true to our poverty-stricken roots is one way that we have steadily expanded our competitive advantage over less nimble, overstuffed competitors as time has gone by.
