BMC, Packeteer: A United Front

Packeteer's application traffic management solution now operates directly from the interface of BMC's Patrol Dashboard network performance management product, giving VARs a wrapper of added brand-name clout when it comes to solving their customers' network congestion problems.

"When you get into the area of traffic and management, you have to offer more than just a narrow part of the solution, and BMC actually legitimizes Packeteer because people know BMC, and only some know Packeteer," said Gary Batesole, the head of marketing and sales at Electronic Strategies Inc. (ESI), Indianapolis. "In a recent deal, BMC got us in the door and Packeteer provided us with a solution."

The BMC and Packeteer products have long been interoperable, but the integration of the two now better positions VARs to bundle and build service offerings around the offerings, said Gerry Roy, director of product management and development at BMC, Houston.

Packeteer adds to Dashboard the ability to monitor different classes of application traffic and actually throttle back less-critical data traffic when prioritizing available network bandwidth, Roy said. "You can literally have an alert that says e-mail traffic is taking up too much bandwidth and edging out my SAP traffic and that's tied to my Web ordering traffic so let's throttle back the e-mail traffic," he said.

The Packeteer-readied version 6.7 of Dashboard also has the ability to track Nortel's Alteon load balancers, Nokia and Cisco firewalls, and Cisco's IPsec VPNs and NetFlow technology, he said.

ESI's Batesole said managing a network's available bandwidth using the improved Dashboard 6.7 product suite is far less expensive than making the pipeline bigger by adding new physical data lines.

The Packeteer deal was one of two announcements last week. BMC also said it plans to acquire Marimba, whose management technology will be added to BMC's Business Service Management suite.