It’s a standard rule in marketing that you don’t point out your competitor’s advertising, as it just draws attention to your competitors and makes it look like they’ve struck a nerve and therefore have a point.

But I’m not a standard marketer – I’m a blogger. Woo! Look at me! I’m spontaneously subverting the accepted conventional wisdom! Whee! I’m bucking the paradigm trends! Yahoo! Us wacky bloggers, is there nothing we hold sacred?

So, here’s Fluke Networks’ latest advertisement, which is currently running on the Network World web site – you can check it out on the “Network Management” subcategory of “Infrastructure management.”

(I’m pointing out where people can see our competitors’ advertising! Lock me in the loony bin, ‘cause I’m a-blog-o-crazy! )

So, here’s the deal. The advertisement consists of three slides – the first: “Only Fluke Networks can do it.” The second, “Not NetScout, Not NetQos [sic], Not OPNet.[sic]” The third is, “We’ll prove it, if you consider us and still buy one of the others, we’ll pay you cash,” with what looks remarkably like our NetQoS SuperAgent product.

First, let’s get the nit-picky out of the way; NetQoS is punctuated with a capital S, as it’s a shortening of “Network Quality of Service.” Granted, this distinction may eventually become naturalized out, much like “Microcomputer Software” became “Micro-Soft” and then “Microsoft,” but still, the fact that the name is misspelled actually calls attention to that part of the ad. It should also be noted that the name “NetQos” is actually bigger than the Fluke logo in the Fluke ad in that screenshot. As a matter of fact, I’d bet that UPNET and NetScot would love it if a competitor misspelled their names in a marketing communication. If you’re going to run an ad with your competitors’ names on it – don’t call attention to it.

Anyway, it’s not clear from the ad, but clicking in, you can see a screenshot, captioned “Would you rather have this?” And there is a difference; Fluke is claiming an advantage in granularity. Fair enough. If they want to get into feature comparison, we think we’ve got them beat.

Mostly, the granularity thing is cherry picking a tiny difference in features. Features are important, but what’s absolutely crucial is having a platform which offers data from the entire infrastructure to provide a comprehensive reporting solution that can deliver the information in a way that network engineers and other IT users can use to pinpoint problems.

So to steal a line from them, would you rather have a network graph that only network engineers can comprehend, or would you rather have… say, something like this?

This is the Application Performance Diagram that uses response time data – a.k.a. SuperAgent – to provide higher-level views of how the network is supporting application delivery.

We actually licensed our products to Fluke Networks who re-branded and sold them for years, so Fluke is very familiar with our technology. Fluke subsequently acquired products of their own and are now competitive (their advertising draws a big red line-o’-nasty through our misspelled name). NetQoS terminated the licensing deal which expires at the end of June. (If you’re a NetQoS product customer through Fluke, you might want to talk with us as your product support will stop).

As for the claim that “only Fluke Networks can do it… know the root cause of application problems in three clicks,” they obviously haven’t seen the videos we put out last week, showing you exactly how know the root cause of application problems in three clicks using NetQoS Performance Center 5.0. Not only that, but we can show you the root cause of server problems and network problems too; we can show you performance by physical location through intuitive maps, and inform you at a glance how applications are performing through our Application Performance Dashboard. You can drill-down to isolate the cause of higher-than-normal latency, view the full packet captures for the problem application and recreate the user and application behavior for diagnosis. There’s a lot more I could add but I won’t – we have to give the sales demo guys something to talk about.