B&C: Hi Tamas, it's a pleasure to meet you again! Today we will talk about the professional side of AIDA64. AIDA64 is well-known by enthusiast users due to its incredible features, but it's a very important professional suite, too. So, can you explain us why you made three different professional versions of AIDA64 instead of one dedicated to consumer users?
TM: It's great to talk to you again. Quite frankly, it was not us who came up with the idea to make a professional version of our software. Back in the days of AIDA32, our first system information product for Windows PCs, we initially focused on home user needs. We've designed the user interface and the feature sets to be appealing for enthusiasts, who wanted to diagnose, benchmark and overclock their computers. But, gradually, more and more professionals also started to use AIDA32 inside various companies and organizations, and they quickly realized that while its detection capabilities were top-notch, the software lacked the necessary features to compile network audits, track hardware & software changes across a whole company, or to monitor and control PCs remotely. So roughly 12 years ago, following the requests coming from network administrators, we went on to implement a whole range of enterprise features and released the new product as AIDA32 Enterprise Edition. What we've got now as the 3 business editions of AIDA64 are the vastly enhanced successors to AIDA32 Enterprise, based on the same idea.
B&C: During these months AIDA64 is changed a lot (new benchmarks, new business features, etc.). The most visible change is the introduction of the “Network Audit” AIDA64 edition. Now the professional portfolio includes three AIDA64 editions for business customers, as we earlier said. Is the automated network audit a feature so much important that it needs to a specific edition of AIDA64? Which are the main users of this edition, if you can tell us?
TM: We basically wanted to elevate our existing AIDA64 Business edition further up, by implementing all features from other AIDA64 editions, to come up with a flagship product that has got every AIDA64 capability available. However, not every professional, not every company has the need to run such a feature-packed software. In many cases, they just want to compile a network audit in an automated way, and analyze it using the AIDA64 Audit Manager and Change Manager. For such companies we've stripped AIDA64 Business down, by removing many features that don't pertain to network auditing. The result is a greatly focused product that is smaller, quicker, and also more affordable than our flagship business product.
B&C: Continuing on that theme, how do you determine if a feature can be useful or not? Who are yours interlocutors about these features? Who are the beta testers? How much time takes the testing of these features?
TM: We and our beta testers and friends are present on the internet at many places where enthusiasts and professionals express themselves. We watch overclocker forums, listen to what those guys have to say; and of course we also directly talk to AIDA64 users via our own forums, email and our technical support system. That way, we collect tons of ideas and requests, and as you suggested, it's not always easy to come up with a filtered list that we will actually have to deal with. But, so far, implementing the most demanded features worked well for us. If we get multiple requests per week for a GPGPU benchmark, it must mean there's an actual interest among AIDA64 users for such a new feature -- and so we've done it :)
As for beta testing, we have many friends at hardware websites, review sites, hardware manufacturers, and we know quite a few acclaimed overclockers as well who have access to the highest-end PC configurations, and in many cases, unreleased hardware and software as well. On top of that, we receive over 80 anonymous AIDA64 report submits every day, from all over the world. Some of those reports may contain a hardware identification glitch or inefficiency that we have to fix, and roll out in a new weekly AIDA64 beta update. The pace of development and the vast amount of user feedback assure that the diagnostic capabilities of our software keep getting better and better.
B&C: Today the Cloud Computing is a main topic, everywhere: in the forums, in the conferences, in the companies financial reports, etc. Some months ago, Jacques Lamontagne, Director of Product Management at WinZip, told us that WinZip will be founded more and more on Cloud services: “With one app, you can convert files on the fly, secure them quickly and easily, and share them regardless of size via email, social media, or the major cloud storage services. This provides a huge value to our users. Today, compression is just one of many features in WinZip. File sharing is now the core of the product”. Do you think that you will integrate in AIDA64 some Cloud features, in the near future? For example, to upload automatically online a Network audit report.
TM: Our business users do not really want to put their sensitive hardware and software data into other people's hands. And the more and more dirty secrets unveiled by various agencies collecting data that are travelling on the internet will just make companies even more cautious about managing network audits. Most businesses simply want to set up a SQL server in-house, collect the data in a SQL database there, and analyze the results by a network administrator or a manager.
B&C: Thinking about the incredible and useful features dedicated to the SysAdmins (Network alerting, network audit, software and operating system analysis, etc), I think that you have a lot of feedback, and the comments could be merciless. Have you ever dropped some features (become useless) during these years? Have you run into some dangerous bugs?
TM: When it comes to refining and improving a program that now has a 20-year background, we strongly believe in the idea of evolution, as opposed to revolution. In most cases we prefer waiting a little bit, test the waters, collect feedback, try various things, before moving into new areas. But when we step into a new field by implementing a new feature, it always has to be a mature one, based on a well-rounded idea. If we get critical feedback, we keep refining the original idea, or completely revamp it if necessary, but we wouldn't give up. Fortunately, so far we haven't bumped into any dangerous bugs, just a few of annoying minor bugs. And we haven't had to remove any features due to loss of interest. Sure, not all features of AIDA64 are for everyone, but with such a wide and diverse user base, every feature has its own fans.
B&C: We can see that AIDA64 is used by a huge numbers of important companies: Porsche Bank Hungary, New Philadelphia City Schools (NPCS), Mecsekérc Environmental Protection Inc., etc. Can you narrate us some enjoyable applications of AIDA64?
TM: We have seen one of the most memorable applications at a US-based 3D medical visualization company. They wanted to monitor the status of their render farm (consisting of fifty Dual Xeon servers) remotely, and start and stop render processes when necessary, from a central location, with just a few clicks. Back then such features were not available in our product, but we have added them to the Remote Monitor module, along with a set of other convenient tools like taking remote screen shots and messaging. Those efforts turned out to be quite well received by other corporate users as well.
B&C: AIDA64 is a great professional suite, but it's often underestimate. A lot of IT technicians or SysAdmins don't know the benefit that AIDA64 can offer: a central supervision over a whole PCs network thanks to a single software. They continue to use individual programs like the Windows services (Task manager, Services, msconfig, etc), VNC, PsExec, etc. What do you think about this? Are they just uninformed about AIDA64 features, or are they Scrooge?
TM: I think one of the problem is that many users believe AIDA64 is just about the Extreme edition, the one that comes useful when overclocking or benchmarking your home PC. And when such an enthusiast is also part of a corporate network administrator team, he may not immediately notice that AIDA64 could also come in handy to make his everyday tasks at work more bearable. You can of course use a whole fleet of alternative tools to perform a subset of tasks, but AIDA64 Business can do it all in a single package, so you don't have to learn how to use a dozen of other programs. And, last but not least: with the rapidly evolving PC hardware and software ecosystem, it's not easy to find a diagnostic software that can identify and interrogate the very latest technologies, like AMD Mantle and OpenCL 2.0. AIDA64 usually supports the latest buzz even before they are rolled out to the public.
B&C: AIDA64 works without problems on Windows, but to work with GNU/Linux machines it needs to a Linux Extension. Why don't you realize a native GNU/Linux version of AIDA64? A lot of agencies are switching from Windows to GNU/Linux: the city of Munich, France's National Gendarmerie, Spain's Extremadura region, etc. Also, what do you think about an OS X version of AIDA64?
TM: So far we're not seeing a considerable market for such dedicated AIDA64 editions. Linux and OS X are slowly getting more and more popular, but our business customers are usually fine with having just a report generator for their non-Windows platforms. We've already rolled out an AIDA64 Linux extension for such purposes, and the OS X version is coming soon.
B&C: About one year ago the Italian site of AIDA64 was launched. Is it the Italian market rich? Which are the main markets of AIDA64?
TM: For the Italian market we definitely needed a strong local market presence, and an Italian web site. Last year, the launch of those efforts made our presence stronger on your market, and things are looking even better for 2014. In one or two years the Italian market will most likely be in our Top 5, where currently is USA, Germany, Russia, France, and UK.
B&C: Thank you again Tamas, it was an absolute pleasure!
TM: Thank you for having me!