Evident Software last week announced a service at Cisco's Networkers 2005 conference in Las Vegas that takes advantage of the NetFlow information on Cisco gear.

Evident’s representatives say the company is making its IT usage and accounting software available as a service to customers looking to get a better handle on application usage for cost-cutting measures. Tapping NetFlow, Evident's professional services group can help IT managers at large enterprise companies get granular information on the assets they know they have and the assets they may not be entirely aware of - as well as who's using them.

"Other tools use NetFlow to track performance and availability information," says Helen Donnelly, Evident’s vice president of marketing. "Evident's Usage Baseline service uses NetFlow to help IT managers get a report on what assets are being used, how and by whom."

NetFlow is a part of Cisco’s IOS software that shows how specific applications are being used and how that usage affects the network. Vendors such as NetQoS, NetScout and AdventNet use NetFlow to help improve performance on enterprise nets.

Donnelly says Evident can help large companies begin an IT governance initiative. For example, IBM's office of the CIO estimates it will save 6% of its global network costs with the IT intelligence provided by Evident. And Fidelity Investments has also saved over $90 million since implementing Evident, according to the company.

The Usage Baseline requires customers to install Evident's software in their data centers while the professional services group does its work. The software resides on Microsoft Windows or Sun Solaris servers and collects application flows, or conversation data, from a variety of network probes, devices, servers and end users. Evident uses a distributed model and recommends users install its software on servers across networks and in data centers. A centralized server collects the data from distributed servers and acts as an administration console for IT managers.

The Usage Baseline is available immediately for $150,000, to assess a single data center in a period of four to eight weeks.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.