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Interview with Steve Hateley, Senior Product Marketing ManagerOverview and current businessInfoVista is a performance management company. Founded in 1995, the company was launched as telecommunications companies began to migrate away from legacy technology such as ATM and TDM to 'best effort' protocols. With its IP portfolio, Cisco played an important role in InfoVista's beginnings. InfoVista started by supporting Cisco solutions and now has extensive libraries from multiple vendors, along with pre-built reports and key performance indicators from many devices on the network. However, Mr. Hateley was keen to emphasise that InfoVista is not simply collecting statistics and providing flat reports. Leveraging those statistics, he said, the company provides capacity management, identifies capacity thresholds, provides service level assurance reporting - supporting service level agreements - and also customer reporting and engineering reporting. InfoVista sits across all three of the service provider markets and is working with mobile services, managed business services and broadband, "Business services or managed services has been our foothold in the market - 50% of our customers are using us for customer reporting on managed services. More recently, we aggressively entered the mobile market and last year productised the Ericsson GGSN and SGSN". "Moving to mobile and broadband has been born from the fact that we'd sold to these operators IP/MPLS backbone network monitoring solutions. As IP has spread into other domains in the network, they're looking for us to extend our footprint within those networks. That's the reason we can now cover the mobile packet core - the GGSN/SGSN type network". InfoVista started with Ericsson and has extended out to Huawei and Nokia Siemens Networks. The company monitors the Ethernet backhaul environment through its business services Ethernet capability, so little has to be done to its Ethernet monitoring capabilities to support Ethernet mobile backhaul. The company is also modelling the radio network controllers and cell sites and touching on the voice network to gather the abstract key performance indicators (KPIs) necessary to support customer experience. On the broadband side, InfoVista has moved out of the backbone through broadband service aggregation and the broadband service routers into the access markets, monitoring IP-DSLAMs, cable and WiMAX to support both residential and business services. Within managed business services, extending the company's traditional VPN monitoring solution to incorporate application-aware VPNs, it can now monitor Netflow and deep packet inspection (DPI) - empowering providers to create and offer extensions to their existing VPN services portfolio. Unique selling pointsInfoVista has merged its application performance management suite with its traditional network performance management suite, which Mr. Hateley noted as the company's strongest USP. The company acquired Accellent two years ago, essentially an enterprise probe specialist, and brought them in with the intention of making them carrier-class. This was successful achieved and InfoVista has now integrated the application performance monitoring with network performance management starting at the database level. The creation of a logical software mediation, which links together the application and network performance data with a common portal interface - which is being continually developed - has proved an important stepping stone. Mr. Hateley commented that some of InfoVista's competitors who are claiming to have unified network and application management are actually only integrated at the portal layer, but are struggling to integrate at the more complex database layer. According to Mr. Hateley, InfoVista's big value proposition for the mobile and business service market is to not only monitor the application layer - which applications are being used by which subscribers, as well as the responsiveness of those applications - but to also revert back from that information down to the underpinning supporting IP/MPLS network, "I presented this at a mobile network performance conference in London recently, and it went down very favourably with the mobile operators. They realise that there are tools on the market for radio network monitoring, cell site planning etc, and also tools to monitor subscriber application performance but what they don't have is the ability to link back to IP network performance in a single platform. When we presented that we've got this unique opportunity to link those three together, the guys responded very well to it". Cloud computingInfoVista is taking a pragmatic approach to possible threats, such as cloud computing, and the company has a number of offerings to counter the increasing buzz about 'the cloud'. On the managed services side, the company has started with traditional VPN reporting and extended that to application aware VPN. InfoVista is supporting WAN optimisation, can monitor data centre performance, and is currently introducing support for unified communications. On the hosted data centre side, the company is planning to pull together the resources and indicators from their network and server management platforms to create a holistic infrastructure performance perspective. Mr. Hateley claimed that in some instances, 'cloud' is being marketing to enterprises, but is often just a software-as-a-service model, "If you've got the ability to monitor server performance for a particular application by using DPI type probes based in the data centre, then you can support application response time. With the VPN you define a specific class of service to support a specific application, you can then use WAN optimisation technology to identify and optimise that application". "A combination of all these together creates a software-as-a-service cloud based offering tailored to an enterprise requirement. The network is a commodity these days but nevertheless your SLAs for the cloud-based service are going to depend on network availability and underpinning IP performance". Market focusIn the economic downturn, Mr. Hateley noted InfoVista managed to keep its revenues flat by increasing activity in emerging markets. In the U.S, where InfoVista has business with AT&T, amongst others, the company found reduced activity but managed to secure a number of contracts in South and Central Africa and the Middle East. The company also has a large footprint in EMEA, including Saudi Telecom, and has recently secured business in Australasia with EnergyAustralia, as well as with MTN Nigeria and Telkom South Africa. From a new business perspective, Mr. Hateley emphasised much more new business will come from the emerging countries of Latin America, Asia Pacific and Africa and this is where the company expects to see increased business in the next one to two years. Business in EMEA or the U.S. is not expected to decline as those customers that utilise InfoVista platforms are still innovating and growing their networks, which brings in a steady amount of license revenues. Major competitorsOn the subject of competing with some of the bigger companies, Mr. Hateley said IBM, for example, is often looking for the extra integration revenue it can make: "If a customer is looking for performance management of an Ethernet-based solution, IBM will sell them a performance reporting product, but at the same time they're looking to sell additional licenses, and I think sometimes these customers are only looking for point solutions to tackle specific requirements and don't need or want excess offerings". This is the time when InfoVista is often brought in - the company can offer customers the type of solution they want specifically for their needs as opposed to trying to upsell additional over-the-top services. Another competitor, Computer Associates, has been on an aggressive acquisition strategy in the last 6-12 months, and has now taken on the challenge of integrating those companies and offerings, Mr. Hateley explained. Similarly, IBM has developed and offers the new Wireless Performance Manager and the company is claiming to have the IP network and radio network integrated. However, citing a recent conversation with a customer, Mr. Hateley said when the product is looked into, this is really a collection of legacy tools, new tools and adaptors that still require a fair amount of integration work, "It's not off the shelf, there's comparatively few off the shelf devices, and that's where we can differentiate ourselves - we have all of this to hand and it's off the shelf, so our contribution to time-to-market is significant". Future prospectsDrawing on the cloud computing issue, Mr. Hateley commented that InfoVista is becoming increasingly aware of an increase in cloud-based customer offerings. InfoVista is aiming to have the base components fully integrated and operable so that it can design its solutions from a platform, "We've got IP network performance, data centre performance and application performance capability, plus a good comprehension of managed services. This combination will allow us to align with the services our customers wish to launch, but from a common InfoVista platform - which is in-line with the expectations of a cloud-based offering". "We're moving in the right direction by consolidating the key components required for comprehensive service performance assurance and taking a pragmatic approach to addressing evolving cloud needs". Mr. Hateley noted that the company is also looking to capitalise on the growth in the mobile space by getting more of InfoVista's mobile solutions deployed in the market. The company has had some advances on the mobile side, which it is looking to exploit later in the year from a case study perspective. InfoVista is keen to continue being seen as an all-IP specialist.  |
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