* Taking network-centric technologies and adding application know-how and performance problem diagnosis capabilities
Network managers today are responsible for ensuring peak performance of networked applications. It may not be their job to develop the application code, but once the code is on the network, network managers are called upon to ensure proper application delivery on the LAN and WAN. And if slowdowns occur, network managers are called to investigate the problem.
For that reason, over the past few years companies such as Network General, NetQoS, Network Physics, NetScout and many more have been taking their network-centric technologies and adding application know-how and performance problem diagnosis capabilities. Because even though the application is not the responsibility of network managers, its performance on the network is. These tools help network managers clarify where performance fell down and if the network, application or server environment is really to blame.
More recently a handful of vendors have taken this application know-how a step further to the end-user machine, or client desktop or laptop. The idea is to monitor application performance on the client machine and report how well the code performs at its last stop. Companies such as Reflectent Software (acquired by Citrix), Tealeaf, Compuware, Coradiant, Mercury Interactive and now newcomer Aternity promise to give an accurate read of the end-user experience with applications.
Aternity, a start-up founded in 2004 with offices in Westborough, Mass., and Tel Aviv, Israel, garnered about $7.5 million in venture capital funding in 2005 to further develop its technology. The Aternity System uses centralized server software coupled with distributed agents to first baseline typical behavior and then report on anomalous patterns. The company says this enables the software to alert IT managers when an end user or groups of end users will experience performance issues — before the actual slowdown occurs.
The company, which has about 30 employees today, emerged from technical stealth mode in the summer of 2006 with products around Citrix performance management and plans to update its system and launch more publicly later this spring. The executive management team has experience with vendors such as CA, Concord Communications and Mercury (now part of HP).
Jaimin Patel, vice president of business development and marketing at Aternity (formerly a vice president of network systems and services for Fidelity Investment Systems Company), says the company is focused on all applications, not just Web-based applications and will help IT managers parse through the events and alerts noise to the real performance issues.
“We are not looking to be another management console in front of IT managers,” Patel says. “We will integrate into existing enterprise systems management environments and send the right information to ensure end-user application performance is where it should be.”
