Every now and then even the biggest companies in the business need a little help.

This time around Cisco looked to network performance management vendor NetQoS to pump up its Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) product with monitoring and reporting technology. And Cisco was smart to do so.

Cisco last week announced a partnership with NetQoS, which involves technology from the latter vendor being embedded into Cisco WAAS gear. The software on Cisco hardware can provide more data about application performance that is generated by Cisco's NetFlow management tools.

This capability could address a common concern of network managers. Often during discussions around WAN optimization technologies, network managers will point out that when traffic travels faster due to TCP optimization or other methods it can also become more difficult to measure the performance improvements. That means network managers can't get a picture of the end-to-end performance of traffic between data centers and endpoints in branch or remote locations. And ultimately that means IT managers can't really determine how much their WAN optimization product is improving performance.

But by using the NetQoS software on the Cisco WAAS gear, network managers can gather data about traffic on all links of WAN connections, as my colleague Tim Greene detailed in a recent news story, "from client to WAAS device, between WAAS devices, and between WAAS devices and servers."

George Hamilton, director of Yankee Group's enabling technologies enterprise group, says in a recent survey only about half of those the research firm asked knew the ROI of their WAN optimization products. Going forward, he says enterprise IT managers will need to have a more granular view into performance improvements so they can better target their investments in WAN optimization technology. Also it is imperative to understand how well applications perform to all end users.

Hamilton recommends IT managers "perform testing to make sure that your performance reporting is accurate and verify it with end users. If your performance is too good to be true, it quite possibly is. Your end users will tell you."

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.