The month of November is flying by, but before it closes I wanted to catch up on some news in the world of network optimization. For starters, network traffic management start-up Anagran has a new president and CEO: John Peters, who most recently served as CEO of data loss prevention vendor Reconnex (acquired by McAfee in September).

Peters’ experience includes interim CEO positions at a number of early- to mid-stage venture-backed companies, including Netli (acquired by Akamai) and Yipes. At GTE Telenet, Peters worked with Larry Roberts, the founder of Anagran and one of the developers of ARPANET, a precursor to the Internet of today. Peters replaces Kim Niederman, who was appointed president and CEO of Anagran just one year ago, in Oct. 2007. Anagran’s flagship product is its FR-1000 Flow Router, which analyzes network traffic flows to move IP-based video, voice, data and wireless traffic more efficiently than typical routers. In September the Sunnyvale, Calif., company closed a series D round of funding totaling $8.6 million.

Other network optimization vendors making news this month include Expand Networks, AlertSite and Hughes Communications. The details follow.

Expand crunches the numbers
Expand Networks wants to make it easier for IT professionals to justify an investment in WAN optimization technology. It’s offering a new TCO/ROI calculator tool that’s designed to quantify the cost savings WAN optimization can bring by enabling IT initiatives such as server virtualization, server consolidation and virtual desktop infrastructure deployments. The tool factors in metrics such as user productivity gains and server maintenance costs, for example. Sure, Expand has a bias -- it wants to make a sale, after all. But the free tool could be useful if you’re trying to prioritize IT projects in today’s budget-constrained world.

AlertSite keeps tabs on retailers’ sites
Just in time for the online holiday shopping season, performance management vendor AlertSite is making it easier for retailers to test and monitor the performance of their Web sites. AlertSite is offering a free trial of its Performance Transaction Monitor and ServerAgent (which monitors a company’s internal server processes) services. It’s also offering a half-price load test, which retailers can use to test the limits of their Web applications before the heaviest loads of the holiday season hit. AlertSite’s holiday offer runs until Dec. 31.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.