Vendors with interrelated, flow-based technology foundations are moving beyond specific, narrow niches to provide more full-fledged suites. For instance, many vendors are beginning to combine packet and protocol analysis (targeted at performance management) with pair-based flow analysis (more focused on volume and consumption), with basic SNMP statistics for component-oriented analysis.

NetQoS is one of these vendors. It supplemented application response analysis in SuperAgent with NetFlow-based capacity and optimization capabilities in Reporter Analyzer, and supplemented its SNMP device monitoring with the acquisition of RedPoint in April. NetQoS also introduced a chargeback capability that leverages its NetFlow monitoring.

More recently, NetQoS introduced Performance Center, a Web-based management portal that’s offered as a free extension to its products. Performance Center offers executive-level, role-based views, and views supporting core network operations, where in the past its products have been used primarily by network engineers and planners. Performance Center also provides native integration across the NetQoS portfolio, as well as potentially with third-party software. The latter can integrate through Web services-based calls for bi-directional GUI access.

In an overall enterprise management market that is growing barely above 10% annually (which is still healthy growth), NetQoS shot up well over 100% year to year, and did so with established profitability and a company size approaching the mid-tier range. (It was founded in March 1999.)

One reason for its success is its focus on pragmatic, scalable and deployable products. NetQoS doesn’t aim to do everything. Its design point has always been on focused data gathering for focused uses. On the other hand, NetQoS has innovated in areas where context and efficiency count, such as using the type-of-service bit and other capabilities for application identification in ReporterAnalyzer, and application-to-network performance triage in SuperAgent. Most customers and users, needless to say, like this combination of pragmatism and innovation.

NetQoS should do well as it grows its feature set to support a more complex matrix of roles and monitoring choices. NetQoS still has a way to go in capturing true executive requirements, but it gets high marks for being responsive to customers, which should serve it well in charting its next steps. It’s certainly worth considering NetQoS if you’re interested in application-to-network performance and optimization issues and want real value without having to boil the ocean.

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.