Network emulation technology was originally designed to help network managers, IT operations teams and developers to create lab environments that simulate their actual network conditions for testing application performance in pre-production. These solutions allow organizations to use historic network performance data to create virtual testing models that generate information about expected levels of performance and help eliminate network performance bottlenecks before applications go into production. Providers of this type of technology include: Anue Systems, Apposite Technologies, iTrinegy and Shunra Software, while OPNET provides a somewhat similar solution for building network models. End-user organizations are reporting that the accuracy of simulated network environments created by these technologies is around 95% and that, somewhat quickly, these solutions pay for themselves. Some organizations that I have had the chance to speak with reported that their network emulation products have paid for themselves four times over in just labor costs alone, as they significantly reduced the number of incidents with application performance in production that IT teams had to deal with.

Network emulation technologies have been around for a while and even though they provide some measurable business benefits for organizations, they never reached wide-spread adoption in the enterprise. One of the main reasons for this is that many organizations are interested in using these solutions only when they are planning new technology rollouts or making changes to existing applications and, therefore, larger organizations that are building a lot of custom applications and have new rollouts almost on a weekly basis have been the main beneficiaries of these solutions. On the other hand, organizations that have only a few new technology rollouts per year have not been able to justify making investments in network emulation solutions. Vendors in this space have been trying to make their solutions more accessible to end-users by providing their capabilities as a managed service or adjusting pricing models, but the key obstacles for the wide-spread adoption of this technology still remains.

In October of 2009, when we launched TRAC Research, we based our approach for covering IT performance management technologies on two advises that we were given by end-users:

• Don’t evaluate products by throwing them into technology buckets, but talk about what these products can do in specific usage scenarios

• Distinguish impactful from “cool” technologies, meaning discover what are the measurable business benefits from deploying a technology solution, not how “hot” the technology is

We thought that the best approach for doing this would be to launch an end-user survey and ask folks that are using this technology what their experiences are. This is when things started to get really messy. Before we even formulated the questions, we conducted close to 150 interviews with end-users, executives of technology vendors, prominent writers and some true thought leaders in this space to make sure that the questions are spot on to what they care about. Just to clarify, none of us are rookies in this space and for me, this is the 18^th survey of this type that I’ve created. Although, this time, launching the survey was more “interesting” than usual.

One of the emerging trends in IT performance management is that the proliferation of SaaS and cloud computing technologies are changing how organizations go about using and managing IT services. These trends are adding a new dimension to service level and performance monitoring and organizations are increasingly expecting a similar level of flexibility from their management tools as they are getting from their SaaS and cloud deployments. This also opens up new opportunities for management vendors to differentiate themselves from the competition and increase their presence in new markets by acquiring technologies that are well positioned to address new management challenges.

Our recent article highlighted two technology companies that are likely acquisition targets based on their technology, alignment with key market trends and the ability of their solutions to fill in technology and go-to-market gaps that larger vendors currently have. In part two of this series, we are covering two additional companies that meet the same criteria.

Again, this listing is not based on any inside information.