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.

Network performance monitoring solutions are not one of those “cool” technologies that get a lot of coverage in the media and these products are sometimes perceived as using an old approach to solve new problems. It’s all about capturing and analyzing packet flow data, right? Well, not really. Not many people realize how much this market has changed over the last 3-4 years.

TRAC Research will cover trends and key vendors in this market in several upcoming reports, but here is a high level overview of 4 key trends that drove some major changes in this market.

It is About Applications on the Network, Not the Network Itself

Back in 2006, I conducted a number of interviews with folks that were in charge of network performance.  The top metric that they were using in that time to evaluate how their networks were doing was unplanned network downtime. I did a similar round of interviews in late 2007 and unplanned network down time wasn’t even one of the top three KPIs that they were using to evaluate network performance (even though it was still extremely important for them). Between these two rounds of interviews, metrics, such as application response times and application availability, became the top indicators of the health of enterprise networks. These changes in end-user needs had a major impact on network monitoring vendors. They caused several major acquisitions, a lot of significant product upgrades, new vendors entering this market, significant changes in messaging and positioning and opened several new markets for vendors that were able to adjust to these changes.