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Network monitoring essential, says Vikas Trehan, InfoVista

Vikas Trehan is Senior Vice President, Network Performance at InfoVista

1. Isn't having an application-focused approach to managing the enterprise WAN a given? Or is it different in the real world when it comes to network management in enterprises?

Managing application traffic and performance in today’s market is a must have for any CIO as many mission critical applications are being either hosted from a consolidated data center or a hosted environment from the service provider.

2. As bandwidth is commoditized, where does the infrastructure management really feature in an attention-priority list of a CIO or an IT decision maker? Isn't such decision left for team members who might be way below in the food chain as it might not be considered strategic enough? What's your take on this?

Despite the gains in technology that has brought down the cost of traffic per bit, the nature of new applications continue to create more bandwidth need.  Look at iPhone, iPads and the consumption it has created on even the enterprise LAN.  Unified collaboration tools of webex and telepresence are other examples.  Also in many regions of the world, the bandwidth access is still over copper or alternative technologies such as mobile broadband.

3. How do you see a company like yourself positioned in a market where pretty much every large hardware vendor bundles monitoring and management tools with the networking hardware?

InfoVista has been partnering with key technology partners and providing multi-vendor solutions for a long time.  Hardware vendors often provide tools that are viewed as Element Managers and happens to have numerous such tools based on the technologies that they are covering.  The market still needs an OSS level monitoring solution that is able to normalize the data and provide other functions such as capacity planning, customer reporting and integration with other OSS’ in the reference architecture.  We strongly believe this need will continue to exist as is demonstrated by the reseller agreement that we have put in place with vendors like Cisco.

4. How do you convince a CIO of value in your offerings when his IT managers can put together a set of cheaper or open source / free tools to get the visibility he wants in his network?

There is different purposes served by the two approaches.  The commercial vendors provide scalable solutions that have been pre-integrated and certified with hardware vendors and maintains future compatibility.  Visibility into the network is just the beginning, the analytics and customized reporting are key for effective decision making for the IT team.