NetScout Simplifies Network and Performance Management for Cloud Services, Unified Communications and Telepresence

For end-users, cloud computing has made applications easier than ever to access and use from just about anywhere. But for IT organizations, network and performance management are more complicated than ever before.

Helping bring simplicity to this area is what NetScout specializes in. The company offers an integrated service performance management portfolio that covers both application performance and network performance. The goal is to improve end user experience.

“Network management has emerged to be a significant topic today, rising into the top ten areas of importance for CIOs,” noted Steven Shalita, vice president of Marketing at NetScout, during a TMCnet video interview during Interop (News - Alert) 2011.

Shalita elaborated that the challenge these days is dealing with blended services that stretch across different geographies and data centers. Simplifying that with a management solution, and a single investment, is critical.

“In the old environment, you would interact with the server to use an application,” Shalita explained. “Today, the elements that make up a service you use, such as CRM or ERP, may touch multiple data centers. With a blended environment, a piece of it may be sitting in your private cloud, and another piece sitting in a public cloud.”

In other words, diverse network environments make understanding performance difficult. Effectively simplifying performance management, Shalita said, is all about expanding visibility. Take mobile applications, for example.

“In the case of a mobile user communicating with the rest of the corporate team, performance management means isolating one user connection as having a problem,” Shalita said. “But, if you don’t have visibility into the operator’s network, you may not be able to pinpoint it.”

NetScout’s capabilities go beyond mobility and the cloud; the company also offers performance management solutions for unified communications. Its nGenius Voice | Video Management product integrates capabilities acquired from Psytechnics, adding new ways to extract intelligence from network traffic. It touches on voice, video, collaboration and telepresence in a deep and granular way.

“Unified communications and voice are addressed in our core solutions set, from a network perspective,” Shalita explained. “Now, we can look deep into unified communications applications to understand performance from user perspective. We can see things like distortion, and frame rates in telepresence sessions.”

The goal of UC performance management is to pinpoint problems in real-time, then get the right team involved to fix issues.

“Unified Communications (News - Alert) services are extremely complex,” Shalita noted. “They deal with applications, the network, the wide area network and service providers.”

For more on performance management, mobility and telepresence, watch the full video interview.

Focusing on the mobile and wireless equipment markets, including vendor market share, forecasts, and LTE and WIMAX deployments, Infonetics Research (News - Alert) has released excerpts from its first quarter 2011 (1Q11) 2G/3G/4G (LTE and WiMAX) Infrastructure and Subscribers report.

Investment continues, particularly 2G/3G network modernization in Western Europe, CDMA upgrades in North America, and 2G/EDGE capacity upgrades in Asia, while the overall mobile infrastructure market is down sequentially, the company stated. During the 5 years from 2011 to 2015, Infonetics forecasts service providers will spend a cumulative $245 billion worldwide on mobile infrastructure, the company stated in a press release.

The report offers worldwide and regional market size, vendor market share, analysis, and forecasts through 2015 for many categories of 2G and 3G mobile equipment, LTE equipment, WiMAX (News - Alert) equipment and mobile subscribers.

“The first quarter of 2011 developed as we anticipated, with the global 2G/3G/4G infrastructure market declining 13.8 percent sequentially on the heels of a very strong fourth quarter; the market is up 14.4 percent year-over-year (from the first quarter of 2010), setting the foundation for the new investment cycle that we expect to last through 2014,” predicted Stéphane Téral, Infonetics Research's principal analyst for mobile infrastructure.

The only segment posting both quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year gains in the 2G/3G market in 1Q11 is packet core infrastructure, which offered up 0.7 percent and 41 percent, respectively, reflecting ongoing 3G expansion activity tied to 2G modernization, the report claimed. Each now about a half billion dollar market globally, LTE (News - Alert) (Long Term Evolution) equipment caught up to WiMAX equipment in 1Q11. The report forecasts the number of LTE subscribers to top 290 million by 2015.

Recently, the company released another report where it stated that VoIP gateway market is waning. In its first quarter 2011 Enterprise Unified Communication, VoIP and TDM Equipment report, the company focused on preliminary market share results. The research was led by VoIP and IMS analyst Diane Myers. According to the preliminary report, the enterprise telephony and unified communications (UC) equipment market, which is made up of VoIP gateways.

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO West 2011, taking place Sept. 13-15, 2011, in Austin, Texas. ITEXPO offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. To register, click here.