Who makes route analytics products?

Last week, we suggested that route analytics is poised to become a mainstream technology for IT organisations that have complex meshed networks supporting business critical applications. We summarised some conversations we’ve had with some IT professionals who talked about the value that route analytics brought to their organisation. Today, we'll summarise some conversations that we have had with suppliers of route analytics products.

Certainly it is not surprising that vendors would tell us how important their products are. In fact, it would be surprising if that were not the case. What caught our attention about route analytics is the breadth of companies that provide products. The point being that given this breadth it is difficult to relegate route analytics as a niche technology.

We talked to three very different suppliers of route analytic products. Packet Design is the pioneer and market-leading provider of route analytics products. According to Alex Henthorn-lwane, vice president of product marketing: "Many large IT shops have made huge investments in monitoring end-to-end application performance and prioritising problem response based on an application's business criticality. Yet, at the end of the day, if engineers can't even see which part of the network is carrying application traffic at a given time, they can't plan any more accurately or troubleshoot any faster. Route analytics fills a critical visibility hole in the network management portfolio."

Henthorn-lwane added that far from being a niche technology, "Packet Design has deployed route analytics solutions globally for hundreds of enterprise, service provider and government organisations."

HP is another supplier. Klaus Muehlbradt, product marketing manager told us that: "Route analytics is becoming a core component of network management software for large corporations and service providers. It closes a gap in network availability and performance management effectively helping to prevent network outages and brown-outs that could disrupt critical applications and business services."

Another company that has developed products using route analytics technology, with a focus on solving control plane issues in carrier networks, is Alcatel-Lucent. According to Lindsay Newell, VP of marketing in Alcatel-Lucent's IP division: "A significant portion of service failures, provisioning problems and troubleshooting delays can be directly attributed to control plane mis-configuration, undetected routing topology changes and the lack of simple tools that would help network operators understand the control plane's impact on services."

We are not saying that route analytics is appropriate for all networks. It is, for example, not appropriate for simple hub and spoke networks. However, our conversations with a variety of IT professionals and suppliers has convinced us that route analytics is poised to cross the chasm for IT organisations that have complex meshed networks that support business critical applications.