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Network General Announces Network Intelligence Suite

Company Delivers VoIP Forensics Providing a Seamless Link between Voice Infrastructure and Service Delivery

NEW YORK, September 18, 2006, INTEROP 2006 – Network General™ Corporation, the leading provider of IT Service Assurance solutions, today announced the Network Intelligence Suite.  New integration of NetVigil 4.2 and Visualizer 4.2 enable unique correlation of the health of business services to underlying IT infrastructure performance.  The company also introduced VoIP Forensics, the first of several new Business Forensics™ solutions from the Network Intelligence Suite.  The new VoIP solution will provide real time monitoring of VoIP performance data and metrics through integrated troubleshooting leveraging Voice Experts and decodes.

“The Network Intelligence Suite allows us to monitor traffic on Cisco directors and switches, as well as Brocade switches – all from one monitoring tool,” said Barney McCauley, principle IT specialist, Sacramento Municipal Utility District.  “In addition, the Business Containers™ enable us to quickly set up and monitor traffic between data centers in one container over multiple gigabyte links, allowing us to quickly identify IT service performance issues and then drill-down into network traffic and application flow details as much as we need – even to the packet.”
 
Setting the Stage for Integrated IT Service Assurance
Despite continuous advances in performance management and incident resolution tools, IT managers have found proactive problem resolution elusive; essential network and application performance data remains fragmented across multiple departmental silos.  The most difficult problems in complex IT systems, therefore, defy everyday troubleshooting and vertical technology skills.  They require very deep analysis of the entire system and a level of expertise that challenges even the most knowledgeable IT specialists.  To overcome the challenge of quickly isolating and fixing business-critical problems in this environment, IT organizations often purchase and maintain at least two IT management solutions – one for network monitoring and another for application monitoring.  The two are rarely integrated, and are often of little value for root cause determination and keeping IT service levels running at their peak.  

Real-time Network Intelligence Delivers Insight Into IT Services
The Network Intelligence suite delivers a cohesive IT service assurance solution enabling IT organizations to keep support costs low, minimize business risk due to outages, develop credible cross-domain IT management best practices, and deliver consistent service to the business.  

“With its Network Intelligence Suite, Network General has shown both innovation and execution in optimizing its investments in Fidelia -- in a way that should bring strong value to its customers,” said Dennis Drogseth, vice president, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). “EMA especially likes the potential of the 'container' model to create optimized management capabilities targeted at specific application and technology requirements.”

With delivery of the Network Intelligence Suite, Network General provides application monitoring products integrated with traditional packet-level network and application traffic analysis products, yielding an unparalleled view of IT services.  Multiple technology layers are managed across IT domains by powerful web-based Business ContainerTM consoles, delivering management and performance information through a real-time view of the overall business instead of siloed technology performance metrics.  The need for support staff to have a deep understanding of the cross-domain infrastructure supporting business services is reduced.  

"Managing application performance and availability is getting more complex with many architectural styles, such as SOA and others. This introduces a lot more moving parts that can affect application performance and availability, said Milind Govekar, Research VP, Gartner. “However, certain IT components, such as the network, are always blamed for poor performance.  Thus it is important for IT to invest in application management tools that not only allow them to measure and monitor end user application performance, but also provide root cause analysis capability to proactively identify and rectify application performance problems."

By transforming IT data into detailed knowledge about the status of IT and business services, the Network Intelligence Suite provides self-service capability for business users and strengthens the relationships between IT and the business.  In addition, the Network Intelligence Suite includes the following benefits:

• Incorporates and analyzes network data collected from products including Check Point Firewall, Jupiter Net Screen, ArrowPoint, Alteon and Cisco RMON and SNMP.
• Business applications are viewed from the perspective of any protocol, component or application flow.  In addition, the solution brings automatic discovery of more than 1,000 applications including Oracle, BEA WebLogic, SQL Query, IIS and Apache.
• Reduces the time required to perform root cause analysis. Instead of manual support processes requiring cross-functional technology teams, problem resolution is pushed to expert-systems technology.
• Intelligently filters out IT infrastructure complexity.  Presents a simplified, consolidated performance view of IT services, driving the business.
• Provides the performance data needed for multiple dashboard views of critical business services.  Technical staff and business owners can both see details on executing applications appropriate to their technology skill set and to their business needs.
• Incorporates network information, application execution information and "context."  Delivers visibility to data being passed across the network as the application executes.
• Represents multiple technology layers in terms of their relationships to one another, reducing the need for support staff to have a deep understanding of the underlying IT infrastructure.

“Today, Network General delivers a key milestone of its strategic intent by providing customers with Network Intelligence Applications that leverage their unique networkDNA™ to solve common IT challenges,” said Ken Boyd, executive vice president of product delivery at Network General.  “By spanning all layers of the IT environment including applications, systems and services, the Network Intelligence Suite provides organizations with the source of network truth, enabling our customers to deliver consistent business service performance.”

The Network Intelligence Suite, VoIP Forensics, and the 4.2 version of the latest products will be generally available on September 22.