* Network General invests in the enterprise
Network General this week is set to announced a slew of product enhancements that the company says will take its portable and distributed troubleshooting tools to a whole new level.
Company executives detailed the vendor’s plans to update existing product lines and introduce a few new tools to help network managers get more out of their existing Sniffer investments. The company last year gained independence from McAfee formerly Network Associates, at which development on the Sniffer technologies suffered, according to Michael Pope, president at Network General.
“We’ve invested heavily in R&D in terms of adding people, from about 130 to more than 200 now, and we have spent over $30 million in R&D, which is about twofold of what was being spent when Sniffer was under Network Associates,” Pope says. “In the past, Sniffer had been weak on the enterprise management level, but with our updates we can provide integrated tools to address many pain points for network managers.”
For example, Sniffer Portable is a software troubleshooting tool that when loaded onto a laptop and connected to a network “sniffs” traffic for IP and application protocols and inspects packets to determine the cause of network and application performance problems. Sniffer Portable can be toted to a location to search for specific problems quickly or connected to a network and left for a period of time to collect data.
Now Network General is looking to make its technology capable of working across enterprise companies. For example, the company is adding a product called Sniffer Enterprise Visualizer 4.0, which will provide customers with application and network performance monitoring, analyst and reporting, Network General says. The tool will let network managers monitor the health and availability of applications as well as components on LAN and WAN infrastructures.
Also adding to its enterprise-scale roster is Sniffer Enterprise Administrator, which provides centralized management software to equip network managers with administration and security tools for Sniffer configuration. The software will also help network managers see across multiple distributed collection products, the company says.
Expected to ship by year-end and early next year, the new Sniffer tools will help Network General re-establish itself as a leader in network analysis and troubleshooting, as well as enable it to compete on an enterprise level with vendors such as NetScout, Pope says.
“Network General is no longer only providing point solutions; we want our customers to know we can provide a completely integrated, enterprise level suite,” Pope says.
