Network General made its debut last week as it prepared Sniffer products recently split from McAfee to face the network management world on their own.

Company executives said they would ensure Network General gets a piece of the $2.1 billion market for network management in 2004. The company says it will have 600 employees by year-end supporting its current roster of 6,000 active customers.

Technically, Network General is still part of McAfee, but company executives say the split will be complete by the end of the July and Network General will stand on its own. The company plans to continue with Sniffer lines such as Sniffer Distributed, Sniffer Expert, Sniffer Voice, Sniffer Portable, Netasyst, Appera and Network Performance Orchestrator and nPO Visualizer.

The company says it will target network managers with its Sniffer products, which perform network-centric application management and compete with the likes of Wild Packets, Niksun, NetScout, Network Instruments and Fluke Networks. Company officials argue, though, that Network General products will take network protocol analysis and troubleshooting beyond what's available today.

"We target all network managers. And there are many levels of network managers. We will do fault management like we always did, but also application management from the network perspective," says Nancy Blair, vice president of product management and marketing at Network General. "We believe that there is a requirement for network management tools to understand how the application behavior affects the network and vice versa."

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.