The evolution of Visual Networks shows how a company can build from its strengths and learn from its failures.
 
Visual Networks was one of the leading pioneers in service-level management in the mid-1990s with Visual UpTime, its Committed Information Rate product that assessed frame relay service-level agreement (SLA) compliance between service providers and their enterprise customers.  Visual extended UpTime to support ATM and eventually IP traffic, and later released IP Insight, which enabled Visual to support IP response time at the desktop for Internet provided services.

The two products fitted naturally as IP Insight's focus on clean, localized deployment with its desktop agents complemented UpTime's Analysis Service Element (ASE), a Data Service Unit/Channel Service Unit (DSU/CSU) for collecting network performance information between a router and the WAN cloud.   

However, Visual's exploration of root cause analysis with its Avesta acquisition proved more troublesome as it required a substantially enhanced service support organization for deployment. This repositioned Visual away from performance to focus across the full internal enterprise without necessarily reinforcing Visual's traditional sweet spot - performance management between the enterprise and the service provider. 

In these "times of troubles," which spanned the end of the dot-com boom at the end of the 1990s, Visual eventually jettisoned its root cause initiative and repositioned itself to harvest its successful service provider business, which was largely driven by service providers reselling UpTime to enterprise buyers.  It continued to broaden its functionality to support just about any type of network access, including class of service over IP/MPLS.

Beginning late last year and through the spring/summer of this, Visual has been introducing a series of developments that refocuses its business back to the enterprise. But this time it is capitalizing on its strengths in performance management and flexible deployment, while empowering the enterprise to govern critical business services in the face of service provider-WAN dependencies. 

Visual has added significant insights into application level behavior to make these native strengths better. The enhancements cumulatively provide enterprises with solid information for both troubleshooting and optimizing network investments as they introduce, maintain or enhance application services. 

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.