Network management critical for enterprises

BANGALORE, INDIA: In today's environment, it has become crucial to optimize the performance of enterprise networks since they run business critical applications and services that are not only relied upon heavily by users within the organization, but also significantly impact customer service and satisfaction

Fluke Networks, provider of innovative solutions for testing, monitoring and analysis of enterprise and telecommunications networks, has been helping companies achieve maximum productivity out of their networks through their innovative products and solutions.

This year, Fluke Networks is focusing more on their performance management business and is planning to roll out a host of products targeted at the enterprise segment in India.

In an exclusive interview with CIOL, Alamuri Sitaramaiah, general manager – sales, Fluke Networks, tells more about top network problems that businesses often encounter and how they can resolve them to achieve optimal network performance. Excerpts:

CIOL: Can you tell us more about network management system and how it helps enterprises in business continuity?
Alamuri Sitaramaiah: Network management system gives insights into the root cause of a problem in an enterprise network, and aids in pro-active management. Traditionally, network management systems have been more focused on reactive management, ie., it notifies whenever there is a problem on the network.

Previously, there was no way to understand what was the root cause of the problem. This resulted in pro-active management where vendors like Fluke Networks offer these solutions.

CIOL: This year, your focus is on your performance management business. Could you elaborate on that?
AS: The performance management system (PMS) basically looks at the usage analysis and the response time analysis of the network to baseline and trend such usages and responses, and also alerts whenever something is going wrong beyond the thresholds which are preset. This helps in alerting the outage issues.

Hence the performance management solution is basically on pro-active monitoring. Whenever pro-active monitoring happens, they dive deep into the infrastructure and come out with the root cause of what is leading to this fall out.

Pro-active monitoring - reactive trouble-shooting is what is the focus of performance management system. And we want to help enterprises in having a smooth continuity of their business without any hindrances and hick-ups.

CIOL: What are the typical network problems enterprises encounter?
AS: There are lot of network problems. But basically problems come from loopholes or flaws in the implementation of the design itself. It all depends on the intensity of IT deployment in every organization. Companies without any IT or an ERP or any business critical applications, literally tend to live with the problem for a long time.

When IT is core to the business, we find that the maturity is high in implementing and handling the networks very well. But the complexity of the problems faced are very high. Complex problems need complex tools.

CIOL: How does Fluke’s products address the pain points/challenges faced by enterprise?
AS: Fluke Networks is mainly known for its portable tools. We are one of the early entrants in this space. We have been defining what performance management means for enterprises. We aid enterprises in PMS, and there are many ways to instrument the same.

We are also a Cisco Technology Development Partner. We partner with Cisco and leverage technologies that are on the Cisco routers and find out the usage and response time analysis.

Customers want the solutions to be either carrier agnostic or vendor agnostic. We have those required set of appliances. So, the unique thing about Fluke Networks is that we can instrument the network the way the customer wants – in terms of technology, pricing and the depth of the analysis they require, and how they want to integrate it with the role of the manager.

Customers need specific information and the tools. So, how we customize this solution for role-specific managers. As regards the electives we bring them to the table is that our solution can be fit in the way the customer wants it. Further, none of our solutions take more than three hours to implement, and that’s the advantage enterprises get from our solutions.

When you talk of network management, the tool should not be a bigger problem than the problem itself. Tools should be very simple to deploy, use and manage. Then problem becomes an easy thing than trying to find out the reason for the problem and manage the tools.

CIOL: Can you tell us more about your Network SuperVision solutions?
AS: Basically, we have tried to articulate our brand promise through the Network SuperVision solutions. It is all about how do you supervise your networks, how do you give that vision into networks.

Network SuperVision solutions provide network installers, owners, and maintainers with superior vision, combining speed, accuracy and ease of use to optimize network performance.

Firstly, we give right tools to the right person. These tools give the network managers planning information and design information. The CIOs are not only responsible for the network, but also applications that target the network. Secondly, we can give them multiple views into the network so that they can zero down to the problem much faster.