Network Physics Announces NetSensory Insights--the Fastest Way to Find and Fix End-to-End Application Response-Time Problems.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Product Is First Independent Arbiter That Helps Enterprises Choose the Right WAN Optimization, Application Acceleration Tools

Network Physics, the leader in application performance insight, today announced NetSensory OS 5.0, featuring NetSensory Insights(TM)--the fastest way to find and fix application response-time problems across any network. The latest solution in the award-winning NetSensory product line, NetSensory OS 5.0 not only helps enterprises identify the source of application performance problems--whether they lie in the network, server, service provider, branch office or application design itself--but also serves as the first vendor-neutral evaluation tool that enables customers to benchmark and compare application acceleration products to quantify and measure which solution delivers the best end-user experience for a specific environment.

As enterprise infrastructures increase in scope and complexity, the identification of application performance problems has become more critical and a greater challenge. While IT staffs may know that application performance is slow, they lack the visibility to quickly pinpoint the cause of end-to-end application delivery delays. At the same time, a plethora of WAN optimization and application acceleration tools have come to market that solve a wide range of application performance problems, but fail to deliver the insight to help users identify which solution best matches their situation. This confusion forces IT to rely on qualitative end-user feedback to help decide which product seems to best improve performance. Without the proper quantitative insight and instrumentation, IT staffs struggle with justifying product selection, managing and tuning the deployment once it's installed, and determining if they're getting their money's worth.

"Performance optimization has been a case of the fox guarding the henhouse," notes industry analyst Rich Ptak of Ptak, Noel & Associates. "When IT staffs don't have the tools they need to see end-to-end, this lack of visibility usually means the first optimization vendor in the door makes the sale. In some cases, the tool results in improved performance; in others, it does not. There's a need for a go-to product that says, "Here's the problem, and here's how to fix it." Network Physics provides this dynamic, neutral, analytic perspective. When IT staffs see exactly what's causing their problems, they make more intelligent decisions about how to solve them. NetSensory promises to remove the guesswork from performance optimization by eliminating blind spots and delivering faster problem identification."

NetSensory Insights are best-practice templates that can be created by Network Physics, systems integrators, channel partners and the company's customers. These XML-based templates quickly and easily walk IT through the audit, baseline, troubleshoot, secure and optimize steps that are necessary to ensure that applications are running at their peak performance.

--Audit--Via an infrastructure assessment, auto-discovers the constantly changing end-to-end infrastructure including applications, servers and networks. Answers the questions: What's on my network? Who's talking to whom?

--Baseline--Measures typical application performance to assist with setting alerts and SLAs; then measures ongoing performance against this standard. Tracks latency, load, response times and application chattiness at the branch, NOC and data center levels.

--Troubleshoot--Identifies and isolates response time issues. Answers the questions: Where's the problem? Is it on the server, network, or hop or at the application provider?

--Secure--Instantly pinpoints worms, spambots, malware, and identifies rogue traffic and bandwidth hogs. Identifies security problems before many IDS solutions. Behavior-based alerting eliminates the need for specific "signatures."

--Optimize--Pinpoints chatty applications, tracks application turns, and provides a basis for before-and-after analysis to compare different acceleration products or optimize performance versus baseline analysis.

Insight templates provide a fast track to problem solving that previously would have taken days and even weeks. Insights also allow IT architects to capture their problem-solving methods and transfer these tools via portals or views to level-one staff, such as helpdesk and NOC personnel. This empowers IT staff throughout the organization to quickly solve problems without handholding from supervisors.

"Solving application performance problems has been a shot in the dark," says Bob Quillin, vice president of Marketing and Product Management for Network Physics. "IT has been forced to best guess its way through problem solving based on a blind view of the infrastructure or the promises of vendors. NetSensory now gives IT staff members the ability to look under the application performance rock--to see the truth about their infrastructure. We help them get a complete picture of the good and the bad, then lead them down the fastest path to fixing their application performance problems."

Other New Features

More and more enterprise applications such as SAP, Lotus Notes, CIFS, and Citrix are relying on persistent TCP connections to avoid the time penalty of setting up and tearing down an application session. This requires application response-time-measurement systems to start tracking application turns within a connection versus just measuring the session, to more accurately reflect end-user experience and chattiness on the network. NetSensory OS 5.0 provides the first, real-time, turns-based, application-response-time analysis system, ensuring that even the smallest application exchanges are measured, thus creating the highest fidelity and finest granularity performance measurements in the market--per application, per user, per branch office, per conversation, and per minute. Additionally, as enterprise applications continue to adopt web-based front-ends, Network Physics now provides URL-based application classification that allows users to specifically measure performance for any web-enabled application or web service.

NetSensory OS 5.0 is part of the company's award-winning family of NetSensory(TM) Enterprise Architecture solutions, which includes the NP-2000 (designed for data centers and major headquarters), the NP-500 (designed for branch offices and medium-sized businesses) and the NP-Director (designed for end-to-end visibility or for global perspective of performance problems across distributed networks).

NetSensory OS 5.0 is available now, and is free to existing Network Physics customers.

About Network Physics

The Network Physics award-winning application performance insight solutions help enterprises ensure the integrity and security of the applications infrastructure by eliminating response-time problems across converging networks. The company's patented technology applies proven techniques from high-energy physics to assure the delivery of business-critical networked applications and services, and gives the IT staff unprecedented visibility into applications and services to better align IT operations with business priorities. This enables users to dramatically reduce the time and cost of new application and service delivery, improve service quality and uptime, align IT operations with business priorities, and reduce operating costs by finding and fixing problems faster. Network Physics was founded in March 1999, and its products are currently deployed at a wide range of Global 2000 corporations. For more information, please visit the company's web site at www.networkphysics.com .

Note to editors: A jpeg file of a screen shot of NetSensory Insights is available upon request.