By Patrick Ancipink
Director of Product Marketing, NetQoS

More and more enterprises and service providers are fully embracing the notion that fault and availability management are no proxy for managing the network for performance.  For that reason, demand for the ability to capture and share performance data across the organization has spiked up significantly in the last year.

One of our major R&D efforts has been in creating different views for different people in the enterprise – giving each person exactly the information they need in a way that they can comprehend, creating value beyond the highly technical engineering IT positions.  And while recent innovations, such as the NetQoS Performance Center map and dashboard views and Connector for Excel help with this, our customers –McCarthy, Edmunds.com, MPS Group [PDF], American Heart Association [PDF], and others – have been using our products for years to supply views to different IT groups to speed troubleshooting and make more informed infrastructure investment decisions. 

To be more specific, allow me to retell the story of PSS World Medical.  When Carl Duhnoski, who is the CIO at PSS/World Medical, saw that the NetQoS Performance Center could give visibility into the network and servers and applications, to provide a faster way of solving problems, he decided to merge the application and network operations teams into one unit - the "Application Delivery group”. Carl puts it this way:

The software has also broken down some of the silos in the IT department. Rather than network engineers and application support staff each looking at a problem from their own perspective, the NetQoS system provides a "single version of the truth". We have people working together in a way we never had before...

The IT groups at PSS are no longer passing problems around like a hot potato but instead working collaboratively to support business needs.

If you want to hear more about the latest from NetQoS, I recently did a video interview with Erik Linask at TMCnet at Interop. I talk a bit about the increased traffic from new video applications on the network; from teleconferencing to YouTube for business use.  As video is becoming more important, (I mean, you’re watching a video right now, right?) companies have to move from blocking streaming video to learning to accommodate it without interfering with data applications. 

But I also talk more generally about what NetQoS does - collecting data from multiple data sources and providing analysis, for example, or how we give people on the first line of networking defense information that they need to solve problems without escalating to senior engineering staff. 

As a fun diversion, see if you can count the number of times I say “y’know.” 

(And for you aspiring start-ups, as much as I enjoy your hair-splitting analysis of vendor positioning statements, I look forward to learning about your value from the mouths of your customers. ;) )