The picks, their fortes Bluewave Networks:   Real-time route and traffic analytics Cassatt:   New data center infrastructure software Cast Iron Systems:   Application integration appliance Convoq:   Presence-enabled Web conferencing Deepfile:   Enterprise file management Mirra:   Media server PanGo Networks:   Location-based wireless LAN software Strix Systems:   Wireless LAN hardware TurnTide:   Anti-spam router Vontu:   Outbound firewall

Bluewave Networks:

Location:
Sunnyvale, Calif.

Company name: Founders hope "Bluewave" evokes the same feeling of tranquility you'd get from watching the ocean on a calm day.

How did the company start? CEO Kumar Sripadam and CTO Guna Ramireddy, engineers who worked together at IP equipment vendor Redback Networks, teamed in May 2001 to develop a product that delivers Layer 3 IP data in a meaningful way. Other products, they say, don't provide enough information about the network, where the problem resides and how that problem relates to applications.

Funding: Undisclosed amount of private funding.

CEO: Sripadam, who had been senior technical director for the engineering team that created Redback's first product.

Product: Infrastructure Analytics and Management System (INAMS) software.

Calming network and application performance storms
Why needlessly cobble together route, traffic flow and application performance information from disparate systems? That's the question Bluewave poses to enterprise network executives, offering them its flagship INAMS as an answer.

INAMS combines network topology information with IP traffic flow and routing data with detailed analysis of inter-router application traffic and real-time analysis of application packets, Sripadam says. Through this approach, Bluewave provides more application-specific data and more immediate analysis than competitors such as Ipsum Networks and Packet Design, he says. "We collect data on many different pieces of the network stack, and we can correlate that data in real time to, say, determine if a service degradation is due to a topology change," he says.

INAMS consists of two components. The first is INAMS Sensor, software that can be installed on a server, workstation or packaged with a proprietary appliance. The second is INAMS Console.