Network Physics Tools Help Partners Pick Best Solutions

Network Physics, which launched in 1999 as a vendor of optimization technology, soon found that the instrumentation and quantification tools it developed to prove its products worked had a bigger market than the products themselves, said Bob Quillin, vice president of marketing and product management for the Mountain View, Calif.-based company.

“There was a huge opportunity to help understand why the network was slow in the first place and connect to technology to fix the problem,” Quillin said.

Now the company works with 45 VARs and integrators worldwide that use the vendor&'s lineup of NetSensory products to build assessment services that determine the health of a customer&'s network and help select the best product to fix performance problems.

“We use Network Physics to baseline our customers to get an idea of where their network and application performance is and where there are potential bottlenecks,” said Gerry Carver, senior network systems consultant at International Network Services (INS), an IT consulting firm based in Santa Clara, Calif. “It gives us more visibility.”

INS has used Network Physics to test the impact of the variety of optimization technologies it works with—including products from vendors such as Swan Labs (now F5 Networks), Riverbed Technology and Peribit Networks (now Juniper Networks)—and select the best one for a given client, Carver said. “[Vendors&'] technology approaches differ. One might work better with one application vs. another,” he said.

The vendor&'s latest tool, NetSensory Insight Builder, is a software development kit that enables channel partners to create customized templates to track application performance. “There is a huge opportunity for our partners to become subject-matter experts in this new way of looking at performance: applications,” Quillin said.

Pricing for Insight Builder, available now, starts at $20,000.