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General Information
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May 7, 2010
• Vol.32 Issue 10
Page(s) 22 in print issue
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Performance Analysis Pros
Opnet’s Offerings Monitor Networks & Applications To Help Pinpoint Performance Problems
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Maybe the flapping of a butterfly's wings doesn't lead to a hurricane on the other side of the world, but IT managers get the idea behind the metaphor: Complex environments can be very delicate and sensitive to change, sometimes reacting unpredictably. Opnet’s mission in life is to offer products that help manage complex networks and applications.
Opnet (www.opnet.com) is a provider of application and network management software and hardware based in Bethesda, Md. It’s a publicly traded company, founded in 1986, that has been traded on the NASDAQ since 2000. Although its headquarters are in Bethesda and more than half of the company’s employees work out of that location, Opnet is a widely distributed company as a result of several acquisitions in the past few years. It has five R&D centers and a couple of sales offices in U.S. cities and sales offices in Europe and Asia. Because the sales force works regionally, many sales employees work out of home offices.
 Product Stable
Opnet has a number of software packages in three categories of application and network concerns: application performance management; network engineering, operations, and planning; and network R&D. Its flagship product is the APM (Application Performance Management) suite, which consists of three offerings: ACE Live, ACE Analyst, and Panorama.
ACE Live performs network monitoring, measurement, and detection of SLA violations. It gathers data about application performance, resource utilization, route quality, and other metrics and monitors network flows through passive Ethernet connections. It works with ACE Analyst, which performs analysis of network packet traces, intermittent application problems, and other data in order to troubleshoot application performance problems.
 Panorama does transaction tracing and uses correlation technology and a statistical correlation engine to detect patterns in metrics and events. It monitors metrics with established ranges for normal behavior and identifies deviations based on how far from normal they are. “The APM suite gives a great deal of historical and actionable intelligence about what’s having problems and why,” says Alain Cohen, president and CTO of Opnet.
Cohen explains that Opnet’s network management products have been around longer and are also good sellers. One in particular, NetMapper, is popular because it builds diagrams of networks automatically. It discovers information about the network, analyzes configurations, and builds a diagram for tracking changes, maintaining security, and troubleshooting configuration or other types of problems. “It can even do predictions if you make changes, such as whether a change will break your survivability [or] resilience to failure, whether your backup plan will work, or whether your traffic will have adequate capacity when you expand and add new users,” Cohen says.
ACE Live is available as Opnet’s only hardware appliance, and it comes in various sizes and form factors. The appliance processes and analyzes traffic on high-speed networks and is Opnet’s best seller among medium-sized enterprises.
Other products offer network planning and engineering for enterprises, service providers, and transport; network research and development; audit, security, and policy compliance; network troubleshooting; and systems capacity management.
Opnet’s products aren’t available in the SaaS model, although the company can install its products onsite for a customer and operate them on the customer’s behalf. “For the most part, our solutions need to operate in the environment where the business transactions are processed and the network traffic is present,” Cohen says. “They’re processing a lot of data, so to transfer it across the Internet would not be the best approach, and some of our solutions just wouldn’t work well that way, particularly in some aspects of reporting.”
Hard Selling
Opnet’s sales happen through a combination of a sizable direct sales force and a reseller network of about 125 resellers around the world, about 85 of which are based in the United States. The company is also working to build a larger network of resellers through its Synergy Program, which allows resellers to sell certain Opnet products.
Most of Opnet’s sales happen in North America, but 25 to 30% of its sales are international. Its next biggest sales area after North America is Western Europe, followed by China, Korea, and Japan.
The typical customers for Opnet’s network management products are larger organizations such as the Global 2000. “Obviously, those companies tend to have bigger networks and bigger teams managing those networks,” Cohen says.
But other products tend to appeal more to small or medium-sized companies, which focus more of their budgets on business applications, Cohen says. The APM suite is a big seller among what he calls medium-sized businesses—a category in which he includes Opnet.
More generally, the company has had success in the financial, healthcare, energy, and airlines sectors. “There’s a lot of money riding on business transactions in the financial sector, and the same is true of health care,” Cohen says.
On The Horizon
The past couple of years haven’t been kind to many businesses, but Cohen feels Opnet has regained its pre-recession momentum. “[The economy has] loosened up a little, and IT spending is coming back,” Cohen says. “It’s still recovering, though, and it isn’t quite where it was a year or a year and a half ago.” Cohen explains that the company weathered the worst of the recession because its sales come from a good balance across sectors, especially from government clients such as the Department of Defense.
In good times and bad, though, the company strives to invest a lot in research and development. “There’s always change, and we have to make sure that we’re always bringing more to our customers,” Cohen says. “Customers want higher capacity, more advanced analyses, and more automation, and we have to keep at it to keep offering those things to them.” Cohen says that the company invests 25% of its revenue annually in research and development.
For the immediate future, Cohen says, Opnet’s mission is to keep looking for new levels of capability for application performance management. It will search for new ways to give all levels of IT staff visibility into the performance they’re getting and to expand the software’s analysis and troubleshooting to every nook and cranny of the IT environment. 
by Holly Dolezalek
Opnet
(240) 497-3000
www.opnet.com
• Opnet specializes in application performance management products designed to help identify performance bottlenecks and pinpoint application disruptions.
• The company targets its offerings at small to midsized organizations in a variety of segments, including health care, energy, and finance.
• “The APM [Application Performance Management] suite gives a great deal of historical and actionable intelligence about what’s having problems and why,” says Alain Cohen, president and CTO of Opnet. |
Application Performance Management Suite
| Product | Description | | ACE Analyst | Performance management software that analyzes packet traces, key statistics, intermittent application problems, and performance bottlenecks | | ACE Enterprise Management Server | Enables packet capture when end users have issues with applications and offers capture agents to deploy across servers and desktops | | ACE Live | Monitors network flows to report on application transactions and users, application performance, resource utilization, route quality, ISP performance, and end-user response times | | IT Guru Systems Planner | Analyzes system configurations and workloads and predicts the impact of new application deployments, changes in workload profiles, and performance tuning | | Panorama | Offers performance management for Java and .NET applications during development, QA, and deployment and operations | |
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