ExtraHop Goes Extra Mile For Network Monitoring

Company:

Headquarters: Seattle, Wash.

Technology Sector: Networking

Key Product: ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance System

Year Founded: 2007

Number of Channel Partners: 20 in North America

Ideal Channel Partner: Enterprise-focused solution providers

Why You Should Care: ExtraHop says its Application Delivery Assurance System is the first network monitoring tool to provide visibility across all seven OSI layers of the network, leading to better network troubleshooting and application performance.

The Lowdown: ExtraHop was founded two-and-a-half years ago by Jesse Rothstein and Raja Mukerhi, both former senior architects at F5 Networks. With network infrastructures growing ever more complex, they sought to develop a monitoring tool that would provide actionable data on not only a few layers of the OSI model of network, but all seven of them -- physical, data link, network, transport, session, presentation and application -- thereby allowing IT managers to know their networks and the potential problems with those networks more intimately than before.

Enter its Application Delivery Assurance System, which provides that type of visibility as a passive network appliance. It requires only installation -- no configuration is needed -- and ExtraHop is now looking to expand the product's reach through reseller and integrator channels.

"There is a ton of marketing hype about application assurance and application monitoring, and to be honest, a lot of it is very cynical rebranding of tired products," said Tom Claeys, vice president of sales at ExtraHop, himself an F5 veteran. "A lot of customers have millions of dollars worth of infrastructure and just don't have a real good feel for how it's delivered, which leads to 'what happened' conversations when it isn't working right. The way we see it is if you're having a conversation around 'what happened,' you've lost that battle."

ExtraHop has signed on about 20 channel partners so far and is in early-stage talks with international partners, gearing up for a broader partner recruitment push in 2010. The venture capital community has also taken notice; this past spring, ExtraHop closed $5.1 million in funding that included money from Andressen Horowitz, the new venture fund headed by Netscape founder Marc Andreesen, as well as Madrona Venture Group.

"From our perspective, the network has to work flawlessly," Claeys said. "We can do extremely high-speed packet processing, and we have a high level of application awareness. It's not getting any easier to figure out where something's going wrong. We're not claiming we're going to perfect networks, but we think we can minimize errors. Companies might be getting by, but we also hear a lot of resignation on the part of IT departments. They may be OK with a 1 percent transaction failure rate, but for billion-dollar companies, a 1 percent transaction failure rate is a huge number."

ExtraHop's product isn't a complex installation, but where it sees a huge opening for partners is as a new solution to ancient network management problems. The hope is that VARs with mid- and enterprise-sized customers getting by on existing network monitoring solutions will be blown away by ROI that, according to Claeys, is measured "in weeks, not months or years, on a product that can be installed in 15 minutes."

"A lot of channel partners are initially cynical. 'There's no way to do this' and 'vendors have been promising this for years' are things we hear all the time," he said. "And being a cool new product, we're asking for non-budgeted dollars -- we understand that -- in a very difficult year. But this is a very differentiated product and we're in demand-creation mode. It's going to get there."