Network Diagramming Channel Feature

Network Diagramming Solutions Provider OPNET Spreads Word about Product Offerings

By Carrie Schmelkin
TMCnet Web Editor

When OPNET Technologies (News - Alert) – a provider of network diagramming solutions – crossed the globe to head to London a few weeks ago, there was one very specific message the company was hoping to spread at the trade show.

“We wanted to spread the fact that our solutions are keeping up to date with the technologies that are out there and that we are even working on what’s going to be coming out,” Pradeep Singh, senior vice president of engineering at OPNET, told TMCnet. “We are viewed as a company that is not just relying on products that were developed and building slowly upon them, but we are being very aggressive in looking out for customer needs, talking to them and shaping our roadmap based on where the vendor industry is headed as well as where the customer challenges are.”

OPNET offers solutions that address application performance management, network performance management and network R&D. While at Cisco (News - Alert) Live in London at the end of January, the company was eager to showcase its AppResponse Xpert product, an appliance-based solution that monitors and analyzes end-user experience for all levels of transactions.

It also highlighted its NetMapper product which is touted for its ability to eliminate the cumbersome tasks often associated with network diagramming by automatically publishing up-to-date network diagrams containing detailed physical and logical views, including Layer 2/3, OSPF, EIGRP, MPLS, VLANs, and BGP. NetMapper creates rich, multi-layered network diagrams in the industry standard Microsoft (News - Alert) Visio format.

Since Cisco Live is a trade show that attracts the overall networking enterprise community, it is a perfect fit for OPNET to spotlight its network diagramming products, Singh said.

“Cisco Live generated one of the max number of leads for us,” he said. “It attracted so much traffic for us that it was really good to see that even in these times when people are cautious about spending, people are interested in the fact that our solutions offer so much to optimize what they currently are using to get better performance out of their current investments.”

“It’s not that we are selling them new networking gear,” Singh added. “We are helping them improve and identify where the performance bottlenecks might be. It’s very useful for people to make the most out of their current investments and they are relying on our software to help them both with application performance management as well as network management.”

While Cisco Live generally attracts those companies that purchase a ton of Cisco gear, it also brought around a bunch of companies with WAN accelerators, load balancers and other data center equipment that OPNET was eager to schmooze with. In fact, the network diagramming company typically gets a lot of activity around people who are looking at firewalls, load balancers or WAN accelerators or just generally having difficulty with network management, whether their applications are running slow or they don’t have good ways of tracking what the trends are in their network.

Moreover, while at the show, OPNET was especially interested in learning about how trends like cloud and virtualization have been affecting the network management, particularly the fact that they are resulting in more challenges for managers.

For example, while managers used to have one simple box and you configured everything on that device, now that device houses 10 other devices inside because of virtualization and what that means is that people need to have the visibility.

“We discover their network and we give them very logical meaningful reports about what the actual relationships are in the network,” Singh said. “Our software is enabled for those technologies and we are able to bring in people to see how their VLANs are configured how their VPNs are going.”

“Cisco Live is an event to showcase new developments we have made in our software and to go and see how the requirements have evolved in the virtualized world,” he added. “Since we have a lot of offerings in the virtual environment, we need to determine what else we need to do to keep up with the technology. What are customers embracing in terms of the vendor technologies because there are a lot of things out there and not everything gets embraced right away? Conferences are a good place to go and chat with customers, because they lay out their requirements, and figure out if our product road map is on track and what else we need to do to stay on top of the customer requirements.”