Michael Cote of Redmonk just recently spoke with us and some other vendors here in Austin, and talked about it in a podcast he put up on his (very well read) blog.

Mostly, he focused his attention to our partnerships with Cisco, Microsoft, F5, and EMC, although there was a head-scratcher when Cote said that we were “getting into some configuration stuff” – which, I guess, if you mean we provide tools to diagnose many problems including router misconfiguration, sorta applies…

The other was a minor slip, which he quickly corrected, when he referred to “Quality of Assurance,” instead of what he meant to say, “Quality of Service.”

However, just to set the record straight – NetQoS provides some of the highest quality assurance possible, with daily affirmations, a self-esteem lab, positive-thinking modules for the Cisco routers, and assertiveness training for passive monitoring.

And if you work here five years, they give you a puppy.

From Cote’s podcast:

I have to admit I’m not an extreme expert in network performance tools and things like that. But what was interesting was to see the approach to spreading around the technology that they [NetQoS] have - just to various, sort of, partners, whether it's Cisco or Microsoft or F5 or EMC or even different geographies.

The position that NetQoS is in, is that, as with a lot of IT management stuff, different primary vendors, I guess you could say, people like Cisco, or people who are selling actual devices or applications being monitored often put out a lot of different information about that advice, and just kind of have it sitting there. And even, when you get into things like Cisco, obviously, there's a lot more advanced things like NetFlow and stuff like that that you can use to dig into an troubleshoot these problems.

So it creates this interesting sort of third party market, where other people like NetQoS can come in and do something with that data and plumb into those systems. And usually, you have to have to have a pretty good relationship with the primary vendor you're integrating with, which NetQoS seems to have. And so, what they’ve managed to do with their various platforms is sort of layer in to - like, peering into the network, and just helping people out with, as their name implies, ensuring quality of service.

And, what I found interesting, I was starting to say, about them, was that they're clearly in the stage where they're comfortable enough with their technology that what they're trying to do now is trying to spread it to different partners and geographies and things like that. So, I would guess, what you would see from them is - establishing more relationships like the one they have with Microsoft and EMC and Cisco, and so forth and so on.