Telecom Newsroom interview with JP Blaho, Director of Product Marketing for Catchpoint

John Paul (JP) Blaho is Director of Product Marketing for Catchpoint, the global leader in Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM). The company empowers business and IT leaders to protect and advance the experience of their customers and employees, offering the largest and most geographically distributed monitoring network in the industry — the only DEM platform that can scale and support today’s customer and employee location diversity and application distribution. It helps enterprises proactively detect, identify and validate user and application reachability, availability, performance and reliability across an increasingly complex digital delivery chain.

With more than 15 years of product marketing experience, Blaho has focused on understanding the buyer journey and the unique personas who influence IT network purchase decisions. Mr. Blaho has worked for leading IT organizations such as NETSCOUT, Sungard Availability Services, Symantec, and IBM Security.  

Telecom Newsroom recently took some time to chat with Blaho about the company, the industry at large and the upcoming ONUG Digital Live Fall event. 

Telecom Newsroom, Question (TNR-Q): What is the one thing that differentiates Catchpoint within the industry? 

JP Blaho, Catchpoint Answer (JP-A): With more than 840 backbone, broadband, cloud, enterprise, last mile, and wireless points of presence, Catchpoint is the only Digital Experience Monitoring vendor helping organizations detect suboptimal experiences from anywhere in real time.

TNR-Q: What do you see as the biggest challenge facing enterprise networks today?

JP-A: With increased migration to third-party services and multi-cloud environments, visibility gaps along the application delivery chain are growing.  NetOps teams are struggling to identify performance issues before they impact the user experience.

TNR-Q: In light of the COVID-19 global pandemic, what advice do you want to give to enterprise networks for consideration today or in the future? 

JP-A: As enterprises evolve their culture for more remote workers and more customers conduct their business online, monitoring and measuring against the user’s digital experience will be key to ensure business continuity and a positive experience.  If anything, data transformation will accelerate.

TNR-Q: What is Catchpoint’s position on hybrid multi-cloud deployments for the enterprise? 

JP-A: Hybrid multi-cloud deployments are a key strategy for data transformation.  As more companies move towards this strategy, the need for an outside-to-inside approach for network monitoring is critical to services’ reachability, availability, performance, and reliability.

TNR-Q: What is one of the biggest challenges of enterprise digital transformation and how should it be addressed? 

JP-A: The biggest challenge to digital transformation for enterprises is having complete visibility into services and application delivery chains.

TNR-Q: What is the one thing that enterprise companies need to be aware of as they embrace hybrid multi-cloud computing?

JP-A: While organizations adopt the hybrid multi-cloud model, there is a cost. Every additional layer of the delivery chain adds more complexity, introduces visibility gaps, and reduces the ability to understand how infrastructure health is affecting the user experience.  The more we move from the edge and outward in the delivery chain, the bigger the challenge to see and even control performance outcomes.   

TNR-Q: What products or services are you most excited to share with the enterprise community at the ONUG Digital Live Fall event?

JP-A: One of the most overlooked components of digital experience monitoring is on network monitoring.  At Catchpoint, our Network Insights part of the platform provides complete visibility across the application delivery chain, improving the digital experience for customers and employees.

TNR-Q: Thank you for your time. To learn more about Catchpoint, please visit www.catchpoint.com.