Magic Quadrant for Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics

Transcription

1 Magic Quadrant for Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics 10 February 2015 ID:G Analyst(s): Vivek Bhalla, Colin Fletcher, Gary Spivak VIEW SUMMARY ACRONYM KEY AND GLOSSARY TERMS Network professionals support an increasing number of technologies and services. With adoption of SDN and network function virtualization, troubleshooting becomes more complex. Identify the right NPMD tools to detect application issues, identify root causes and perform capacity planning. Market Definition/Description This document was revised on 23 February The document you are viewing is the corrected version. For more information, see the Corrections page on gartner.com. Network performance monitoring and diagnostics (NPMD) enable network professionals to understand the impact of network behavior on application and infrastructure performance, and conversely, via network instrumentation. Other users and use cases exist, especially because these tools provide insight into the quality of the end-user experience. The goal of NPMD products is not only to monitor network components to facilitate outage and degradation resolution, but also to identify performance optimization opportunities. This is conducted via diagnostics, analytics and debugging capabilities to complement additional monitoring of today's complex IT environments. At an estimated $1.1 billion, the NPMD market is a fast-growing segment of the larger network management space ($1.9 billion in 2013), and overlaps slightly with aspects of the application performance monitoring (APM) space ($2.4 billion in 2013). Magic Quadrant AA NPM APM CSP EUE IPM ITOA MPLS NPB NFM NFV SDN SNMP VPN EVIDENCE Application-Aware Network Performance Monitoring Application Performance Monitoring Communications Service Provider End-User Experience Infrastructure Performance Monitoring IT Operations Analytics Multiprotocol Label Switching Network Packet Broker Network Fault Management Network Function Virtualization Software-Defined Networking Simple Network Management Protocol Virtual Private Network Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics "JDSU to Separate Into Two Industry-Leading Public Companies," JDSU, 10 September "NetScout Systems to Acquire Danaher's Communications Business," 13 October NOTE 1 SPECIFIC HARDWARE LIFE SPAN CONSIDERATIONS FOR NPMD SYSTEMS When evaluating and selecting an NPMD solution, it is important to keep in mind that any packet-data-storing hardware (whether derived from the NPMD vendor or a third party) will be subjected to heavy amounts of strain due to network input/output (I/O) and disk I/O activity. This will have an impact on the life span of the hardware equipment. NOTE 2 HONORABLE MENTIONS The following vendors were close to passing the requirements to be included in this research, and could be included in future versions of this Magic Quadrant under appropriate market conditions: Source: Gartner (February 2015) Vendor and AppNeta Founded in 2011, Boston-based AppNeta focuses on application performance monitoring. It acquired significant intellectual property and an installed base from the now-defunct Apparent Networks. Much of the heritage of the company comes from NPMD. AppNeta is focused on easy-to-deploy, inexpensive SaaS-based solutions. Its NPMD technologies have changed during the past 12 months, and AppNeta is now more focused on application visibility. AppNeta's core NPMD features come from its AppView product (for synthetic application availability Emulex (Endace) The vendor did not qualify due to the lack of flow analysis in the offering. Emulex (Endace) builds custom hardware and software solutions that provide detailed packet recording, and offers associated monitoring software for those organizations with requirements for high performance and accuracy. ExtraHop The vendor did not qualify for inclusion due to the lack of NetFlow collection in the offering. ExtraHop's easily deployed appliances and deep visibility into applications and network topology make it an excellent jumping-off point for those looking for an easy approach to solving application performance needs. Extreme Networks The vendor did not qualify for inclusion due to the lack of IPFIX collection in the offering. Extreme Networks' NetSight tool provides packet and NetFlow collection for wired and wireless networks via a distributed client/server architecture. The tool also includes policy, inventory and access control management components, which sets it apart from traditional NPMD vendors. Paessler The vendor did not qualify for inclusion due to the inability to support 10G environments at full line rate via a single instance of the tool. Paessler's PRTG tool provides agentless server monitoring, network fault monitoring, flow monitoring and packet sniffer technology to determine application usage. The solution is aggressively priced and is available via a try-beforeyou-buy go-to-market strategy. Sideband Networks The vendor did not qualify for 1 de :56

2 2 de :56 monitoring), enhanced with SaaS-specific monitoring for Salesforce, ServiceNow, Microsoft Dynamics and Office 365, Google Docs, NetSuite and athenahealth. FlowView provides traffic analysis including both deep packet inspection and flow analysis. The unique component of the offering is PathView, which provides deep path analysis along with patented capacity measurement. Most of AppNeta's improvements to date have been focused on application measurement, and the efforts are largely seen in the TraceView product, which provides APM for modern Web applications. While the deployment characteristics of each solution component vary between little (small physical or software appliances) to no footprint, the core analysis is done via a SaaS-delivered portal. AppNeta does support on-premises deployments for core NPMD features as well. AppNeta's NPMD revenue is between $5 million and $10 million per year. AppNeta did not respond to requests for supplemental information and/or to review the draft contents of this document. Gartner's analysis for this vendor is therefore based on other credible sources, including previous vendor briefings and interactions, the vendor's own marketing collateral, public information and discussions with more than 200 end users who either have evaluated or deployed each NPMD product. Its full-featured offering, including APM and NPMD within lightweight SaaS delivery, appeals to those wishing to experiment with technologies without large capital investment. PathView's capabilities, including multiple appliance form factors and hardware/software deployment options, appeal to those wishing to measure distributed networks and branch offices. AppNeta has benefited from the growth in SaaS use among enterprises; this differentiates it from offerings that focus on packet or network buyers only. Management changes across several executive areas have resulted in a decreasing focus on NPMD. AppNeta is shifting its product and marketing focus away from network monitoring buyers who represent a significant (if slower growing) portion of its current customer base. The modules within AppNeta's offering are linked together, but they do not share a common user interface or back-end data store, creating some fragmentation and inconsistency within the offering. Automic (Orsyp) Automic acquired Orsyp in May Automic has U.S. headquarters in Bellevue, Washington, with global headquarters in Austria. While the company is focused on workload automation, application release automation and automated service orchestration, the acquisition of Orsyp provided the means to build a dedicated business unit focused on NPMD. Orsyp's NPMD tool, while originally rooted in quality of service (QoS)-oriented deep packet inspection capabilities developed internally, is focused on the Sysload and Streamcore products. Orsyp's Sysload 5.80 provides performance and endpoint monitoring capabilities, as well as capacity planning. Streamcore 6.2 adds WAN optimization and network performance monitoring capabilities. Recent feature inclusions are enhanced NetFlow collections (NetFlow v.9 collection capabilities on the central management console), 10 Gbps support and a renovated service-oriented scorecard dashboard. Streamcore probes can manage up to 10 Gbps of traffic for classification and QoS, and probes can be stacked to manage up to 40 Gbps in monitoring only. The improved scorecard dashboard provides the ability to consolidate large numbers of sites and dozens of applications with drill-down capabilities through site, application, flow and packets. Automic (Orsyp) NPMD revenue is between $11 million and $20 million per year. Complementary technologies have been consolidated to provide a well-rounded overall solution, including the ability not only to monitor, but also to depict the QoS and application delivery. The visually compelling user interface captures typical operator workflows well, including troubleshooting and optimization use cases, and demonstrates an innovative approach to present multiple dimensions of status easily. As part of Automic, the NPMD solution is now part of a larger company (combined revenue is roughly triple that of Orsyp alone) with greater resources, and which boasts a solid network of partners (35 channel partners outside of the Americas). The former Orsyp solutions are now part of a larger organization that has its primary focus on other technologies, making NPMD an even smaller focus within Automic than it was under Orsyp. While Automic (Orsyp) conducts business globally, it has not yet broadly expanded its NPMD installed base outside of EMEA. Resources devoted to NPMD are limited for this midsize organization. CA Technologies CA's extensive history and product set for NPMD was built over many years of acquisitions and organic development. Founded in 1976 and based in Islandia, New York, CA's R&D centers span multiple locations, but are centralized in Fort Collins, Colorado, for core NPMD functions. CA has the largest focused revenue within the IT operations management (ITOM) area, including an extensive product portfolio. CA has been undergoing rapid change, including shifts in strategy around long-term plans. CA's offerings for this Magic Quadrant are based on the CA Performance Management solution, and completed with other offerings including CA Network Flow Analysis, CA Unified Communications Monitor, and CA Application Delivery Analysis (ADA), which is focused on packet-level inspection. If additional depth is needed, CA has a referral relationship and integration with Network Instruments' Observer GigaStor product for packet storage and analysis. CA has other products for physical and virtual systems and operating system monitoring. Data from the CA components is rolled into CA Performance Management, which provides a single user interface and reporting system across the components. When depth is needed, there are drill-downs into the specific products. CA's NPMD revenue is between $151 million and $300 million per year. CA's broad portfolio includes many functional areas, with a strong partner and internal service capability to implement and maintain the solutions. CA changed its development organization during the past two years in order to become more agile inclusion due to a lack of flow analysis and sufficient customers. The company is a new startup having been founded in Sideband Networks raised $6 million in Series A funding in February The tool ingests packet, SNMP and log data, which is sent to an analytics engine that produces a topological and traffic flow model and overlays application usage patterns. Sideband is adding support for common flow formats in 1Q15. SolarWinds The vendor did not qualify for inclusion due to the inability to support 10G environments at full line rate via a single instance of the tool. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor brings packet inspection and analysis capabilities via a distributed software-based deployment model. The product also supports up to 300,000 flows per second, and presents a cost-effective and potentially market-disrupting technology. Splunk The vendor did not qualify for inclusion due to the inability to support 10G environments at full line rate via a single instance. Splunk App for Stream takes the company's ability to parse and analyze log and metric data and applies the same technique to wire data (packet and flow records). This distributed software-based solution can be deployed via SaaS or on-premises, and offers the ability to combine machine log data with insight derived from the network domain in a consolidated fashion to highlight meaningful insight in a consumable manner. EVALUATION CRITERIA DEFINITIONS Ability to Execute Product/Service: Core goods and services offered by the vendor for the defined market. This includes current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills and so on, whether offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships as defined in the market definition and detailed in the subcriteria. Overall Viability: Viability includes an assessment of the overall organization's financial health, the financial and practical success of the business unit, and the likelihood that the individual business unit will continue investing in the product, will continue offering the product and will advance the state of the art within the organization's portfolio of products. Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor's capabilities in all presales activities and the structure that supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation, presales support, and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel. Market Responsiveness/Record: Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve and market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendor's history of responsiveness. Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver the organization's message to influence the market, promote the brand and business, increase awareness of the products, and establish a positive identification with the product/brand and organization in the minds of buyers. This "mind share" can be driven by a combination of publicity, promotional initiatives, thought leadership, word of mouth and sales activities. Customer Experience: Relationships, products and services/programs that enable clients to be successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the ways customers receive technical support or account support. This can also include ancillary tools, customer support programs (and the quality thereof), availability of user groups, service-level agreements and so on. Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. Factors include the quality of the organizational structure, including skills, experiences, programs, systems and other vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing basis. Completeness of Vision Market Understanding: Ability of the vendor to understand buyers' wants and needs and to translate those into products and services. Vendors that show the highest degree of vision listen to and understand buyers' wants and needs, and can shape or enhance those with their added vision. Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of messages consistently communicated throughout the organization and externalized through the website, advertising, customer programs and positioning statements. Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling products that uses the appropriate network of direct and indirect sales, marketing, service, and communication affiliates that extend the scope and depth of market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and the customer base. Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendor's approach to product development and delivery that emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature sets as they map to current and future requirements. Business Model: The soundness and logic of the

3 3 de :56 to increase release velocity, providing point releases with fixes and new functionality every three to four months. CA's financial viability, and the fact that the company is public, shows there is limited risk to business stability involved in doing business with the company. New leadership with a proven track record of innovation is a departure from previous leadership. Complexity and size of the CA product portfolio continues to be an issue. Scalability of packet analysis and management of the ADA probes are common user complaints; the product doesn't have the same scale issues when dealing with SNMP or flow data. The product is currently designed and used by customers primarily for reporting and dashboard purposes versus guided diagnostic troubleshooting. vendor's underlying business proposition. Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of individual market segments, including vertical markets. Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes. Geographic Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography, either directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for that geography and market. Cisco Cisco's large hardware installed base across network environments gives it a large addressable set of customers across verticals. With extensive software, Cisco provides what customers need to manage a Cisco-centric environment. Founded in 1984, with headquarters in San Francisco, California, Cisco is focused on moving from a network-hardware-centric company to include unified communications, server hardware (Unified Computing System [UCS]), management software and extensive SaaS capabilities for collaboration. Cisco's offerings include Cisco Prime Infrastructure (PI) for SNMP and flow monitoring, configuration management, and provisioning Cisco hardware devices. Cisco Prime Network Analysis Module (NAM) is an appliance-based solution (physical server, physical module within a device, virtual machine) for packet analysis. The data can be analyzed via PI, and the NAM devices can be managed centrally. Cisco Prime Collaboration (PC) provides monitoring, configuration management and provisioning of Cisco's unified communications solutions. Cisco provides workflows for troubleshooting, and focuses on integration with Cisco technologies along with identity and access management. Cisco's NPMD revenue is between $51 million and $150 million per year. Cisco is in a unique position to support its pervasive networking installed base. Its NPMD solution goes very deep within Cisco technologies and has industry-leading support for Day 1 releases of Cisco hardware and software within the management technologies. Flow generation by Cisco devices (such as Next Generation Network-Based Application Recognition [NBAR2] included in Application and Visibility Control [AVC] 2.0) are among the best and most useful implementations in the industry, supporting recognition and basic performance monitoring of thousands of application types. This is supported in both the devices and the NPMD tools, which leverage NBAR2. The uniform UI across the Prime products makes navigation consistent across modules and implementations. Corvil Central packet analysis is limited in Cisco solutions, since data is summarized off the NAM devices. This prevents the capability for historical, distributed or deep packet analysis after packets have been processed. The limited capability in this space is done via a dated user interface off a specific NAM instance. Cisco Prime product sets are often included in deals, and used for point solution management; unfortunately, the support for non-cisco devices is minimal today, requiring buyers to purchase other management tools for availability and performance monitoring, including NPMD. Analytics capabilities are limited; most of the product is based on reporting and presenting large reports of metric data. Corvil's focus has historically been on the need for short-time-scale network monitoring, such as in the high-frequency trading market. Founded in 2000, Corvil is privately held and headquartered in Dublin, Ireland. It recently refocused on improving its streaming analytics platform for IT operations, which brought some initial activity from customers outside of the financial markets for the first time. The company and product transition began in the summer of 2014, with the release of the Corvil streaming analytics platform, called Giga (aka CorvilNet 8.2), in what is planned to be a 12- to 18-month transition. The company is also focused on go-to-market expansion via the indirect sales channel to include two-tier distribution, system integrators and service providers (for example, Dimension Data, BT, CenturyLink, IBM and CSC). The platform includes several new capabilities, including autodiscovery of data sessions on the network, plug-ins to analyze applications and protocols, support for big data platforms and the ability to publish analytic streams to big data and business intelligence (BI) systems. However, Corvil still lacks 40G support. Corvil's NPMD revenue is between $21 million and $50 million per year. The offering can monitor large amounts of data at rapid speeds. This will appeal to companies beyond Corvil's high-speed trading installed base, as concepts such as the Internet of Things (IoT) are adopted into the mainstream. Corvil's NPMD solution excels in terms of multisegment analysis and accuracy of packet analysis. Increased capabilities on analytics and integration with BI systems are a differentiator and unique selling point. The user interface is geared to the highly technical network engineer supporting high-speed data environments, limiting the speed of adoption and appeal to those less technically proficient. There are few "greenfield" opportunities in the company's financial vertical core. This will invariably inhibit growth. The company is still relatively small, but has fairly large typical deal sizes, making it somewhat dependent on large deals as it moves to expand to a broader audience. Fluke Networks Fluke Networks emerged from Fluke Corp.'s network testing equipment for diagnostics capability in

4 4 de : Fluke Corp. and Fluke Networks are wholly owned subsidiaries of the Danaher Corp. since 1998, but this will change given Danaher's October 2014 announcement of the proposed sale of its communications business (including Fluke Networks) to NetScout Systems, scheduled to conclude in 1H15. The first Fluke Networks product was the OptiView NetFlow Tracker, a network troubleshooting tool. Fluke Networks' offerings have expanded beyond this initial focus, upselling new capabilities to its large footprint of existing OptiView users. Acquisitions, such as Visual Networks in 2006 and ClearSight Networks in 2009, expanded its NPMD portfolio, forming its core solution, Visual TruView 9.5, which features distributed voice over IP (VoIP) and video monitoring support, and advanced path analysis. TruView is designed to serve the needs of large enterprises and carrier-grade service providers. Network Time Machine 9.1 (a scale-out leveraging TruView) and OptiView XG 12.1 (a handheld application and network diagnostic tool) complete the NPMD portfolio. TruView's broad data source support includes packet analysis, flow analysis and SNMP polling. Applications, such as Microsoft Lync and Citrix environments, are also supported. TruView appliances are sized based on network storage and processing requirements. OptiView XG provides endpoint and additional data to TruView to enable centralized troubleshooting analysis. In 2014, Fluke Networks launched the beta version of TruView Live, a SaaS-based delivery solution with monthly and yearly subscription options. Fluke Networks' NPMD revenue is between $51 million and $100 million per year. Strong contextual drill-down capabilities help simplify diagnostic and troubleshooting workflows. Fluke has a well-defined global sales organization demonstrating success via direct sales (in the U.S.) and channel partners (in EMEA and Asia/Pacific). TruView is a single modular appliance-based product offering that allows the customer to repurpose and use each appliance for multiple types of data acquisition. Fluke Networks' NPMD strategic road map remains unclear in light of the impending merger of Danaher's communications business with NetScout. Questions surround the extent to which Danaher has achieved technology sharing among the acquired companies that form its communications business (VSS Monitoring, Arbor Networks, Tektronix and Fluke Networks), translating to risks of resource inefficiencies and capability overlap. While the vendor continues to innovate, its ability to demonstrate product enhancements and overall capabilities has regressed. Genie Networks Founded in 2000, Genie Networks targets its solutions for the communications service provider (CSP) industry. Based in Taiwan, the company looks to provide scalable yet competitively priced solutions. Building from a competency in traditional SNMP-based network fault and performance monitoring capabilities, Genie Networks also incorporates deep packet inspection and flow analysis into its current offering, GenieATM The latest features include support for MPLS VPN networks and extended traffic analysis reports. Reporting templates for several CSP-oriented use cases are packaged with the default product, and these were augmented in the past year to include greater forensic and BGP routing analysis. The product has also been developed to appeal to security buying centers with the inclusion of spoofed IP detection and other anomaly mitigation features. Genie Networks' NPMD revenue is between $11 million and $20 million per year. Prebuilt reporting templates support key CSP customer support and operations use cases out of the box. Attractive pricing and carrier-grade scalability should continue to stimulate enterprise customer interest. An appliance-based product form factor simplifies implementation, particularly in highly distributed environments. HP Committed CSP and Asia/Pacific prioritization compromises adoption beyond these vertical and geographical focal points, although the EMEA client base has almost doubled in the past 12 months. The product's user interface, while demonstrating some new features, remains perfunctory compared to the most sophisticated examples in the market space. Analytics capabilities are basic, centered on automated baselining to support anomaly detection and on security-focused use cases. One of the first vendors to offer enterprise network monitoring tools, HP has a long history of investment in this market, and a substantial portfolio and customer base, particularly in network fault management. Even as HP continues to maintain a strong market position, its customers continue to express concern to Gartner regarding HP's focus, strategy and execution. HP's recently announced split will likely result in little to no direct impact on NPMD strategy and execution. HP's NPMD product packaging and pricing has been radically simplified over the past year. A key component of HP's Business Service Management (BSM) offering, the NPMD solution is joined by APM, event correlation and analysis, and other HP technologies to support availability and performance monitoring. HP's NPMD solution is composed of the Network Node Manager i (NNMi) v.10.0, available in Community, Premium and Ultimate editions, with each edition differentiated by the number of types of included Smart Plug-ins, as well as HP Real User Monitor (RUM) v.9.24 (also available in Premium and Ultimate editions) for deep packet inspection. HP's NPMD revenue is between $151 million and $300 million per year. HP's vision for the increasing role of IT operations analytics (ITOA) technologies in NPMD is strong. Data interchange, modeling and process-level integration with other HP solutions is robust. The vendor offers a broad portfolio of complementary availability and performance monitoring products.

5 5 de :56 Usability is hindered by multiple, varied and dated user interfaces across the NPMD solution. Customers report difficulty in implementation and management of the complex solution. Implementation and integration of ITOA capabilities is not pervasive, both within NPMD solution components and across the HP BSM portfolio. InfoVista InfoVista's history as a carrier-grade and large-enterprise-focused NPMD provider began in 1995, based in Les Ulis, France, with a heavy physical presence in France. Offerings span NPMD, wireless network design and planning, mobile network optimization, and configuration assurance. Product offerings focused on NPMD include VistaInsight for Networks (which includes the Vista360 UI) for visualization across the components in the solution. Those components are 5View Service Data Manager (for data aggregation and analysis of the raw metric data, before feeding up to VistaInsight for Networks); 5View Netflow (appliances that provide flow collection, supporting NetFlow, sflow, JFlow and Internet Protocol Flow Information Export [IPFIX] data sources); 5View Applications (appliances that provide deep packet inspection capabilities); and the final module, 5View Mediation (for collection of data from appliances doing packet and flow analysis for reporting purposes). InfoVista is active within carrier-specific marketing activities, and contributes to standards bodies for carrier services, such as carrier-ethernetfocused Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF), in addition to TeleManagement Forum (TMF) and next-generation mobile network (NGMN). It focuses on the service assurance component of the TMF framework, and integration with operations support system (OSS) architectures. InfoVista's NPMD revenue is between $51 million and $150 million per year. InfoVista remains focused on solution scalability, meeting the needs of some of the largest carrier and large-enterprise networks. InfoVista does carrier focus well, expanding offerings specific to those buyers, and increasing support and capability of the products. Flexibility of the InfoVista solution allows it to meet sophisticated use cases, which many other vendors cannot meet. Complexity within the InfoVista product line may result in long lead times in implementation, difficulty with product usability, and typically high levels of required consulting often driven by the need to meet customer-specific use cases. Growth has been slow, since most customers are carriers and large enterprises, although InfoVista has been introducing new offerings to complement existing product lines. InfoVista has a heavy reliance on customers in EMEA, which make up 60% of its installed base. JDSU (Network Instruments) In 2014, we have witnessed the completion of JDSU's acquisition of Network Instruments, its subsequent integration into JDSU's Network and Service Enablement business segment, the recent release of updates to its NPMD offering, and announced plans to separate JDSU into two entities in While this action could provide additional efficiencies and focus in the future, the preceding business integration and sales enablement efforts are only now beginning to bear fruit and will have to shift once more in response to the coming changes. The Network Instruments unit has followed a well-established, vertically integrated technology development strategy, designing and manufacturing most of its product components and software. An OEM relationship with CA Technologies, which had Network Instruments providing its GigaStor products to CA customers, devolved into a referral relationship, but no meaningful challenges have been voiced by Gartner clients as a result of this. Two key parts of the NPMD solution have new product names (Observer Apex and Observer Management Server) and a new, modern UI that is a significant improvement. Network Instruments' current NPMD solution set is now part of the Observer Performance Management Platform 17, and includes Observer Apex, Observer Analyzer, Observer Management Server, Observer GigaStor, Observer Probes and Observer Infrastructure (v.4.2). JDSU's (Network Instruments) NPMD revenue is between $51 million and $150 million per year. Data- and process-level integration workflows are well-thought-out across the solution's component products. Network Instruments' recent addition of a network packet broker product (Observer Matrix) to its offerings may appeal to small-scale enterprises looking for NPMD and NPB capabilities from the same vendor. Packet capture and inspection capability (via GigaStor) is well-regarded by clients. While significant business integration activities have not, to date, had a perceptible impact on support or development productivity, this process is ongoing and now part of a larger business separation action that could result in challenges in the near future. The NPMD solution requires multiple components with differing user interfaces that are not consistent across products. The solution is focused on physical appliances, with limited options beyond proprietary hardware. NetScout Systems Founded in 1984 and headquartered in Westford, Massachusetts, NetScout Systems focuses almost exclusively on providing network performance monitoring solutions to customers in enterprise, service provider and public-sector markets. Thanks to NPMD market growth, lengthy market tenure and acquisition execution, NetScout maintains a sizable market share. NetScout is no stranger to chasing growth and reactively extending its capabilities via acquisition (acquisitions include Network General, Simena, Fox Replay, Psytechnics and Accanto Systems), of particular interest is its recent announcement of its intention to acquire Danaher Corp.'s sizeable communications business (which includes NPMD competitor Fluke Networks) in exchange for $2.6 billion of NetScout stock. Upon completion, the acquisition will increase NetScout's NPMD market share, but at the expense of significant, potentially lengthy portfolio rationalization efforts due to substantial technology overlap, complexity and the size of the overall acquisition. These efforts will join ongoing and, to date, successful