PV buy takes Accedian network monitoring to the enterprise
Carrier supplier Accedian heads to the enterprise market with the acquisition of French company Performance Vision. Accedian network monitoring tools complement PV's NPM software.
Accedian, a provider of network monitoring tools for carriers and large financial institutions, has acquired Performance Vision, launching Accedian into the mainstream enterprise software market.
Accedian, a privately held U.S. company headquartered in Montreal, announced this week it had purchased Performance Vision, but did not provide financial details.
Performance Vision's PVX product will become the core technology in Accedian's recently formed enterprise business unit. Performance Vision, a Paris-based maker of application and network performance management technology, has about 30 employees, with half of them developers.
"It's an interesting move," Shamus McGillicuddy, an analyst at Enterprise Management Associates, based in Boulder, Colo., said of the acquisition. "It could be a really good move for Accedian, and it could make them a competitor in the enterprise NPM [network performance management] space."
Almost half of Accedian's revenue currently comes from U.S. carriers and financial institutions that use the Accedian network monitor, SkyLIGHT VCX, which tracks network latency and availability. Within SkyLIGHT is technology that could make PVX a more competitive enterprise product, McGillicuddy said.
For example, Accedian has a virtual packet broker that would be a "perfect fit" for PVX, McGillicuddy said. PVX, in combination with SkyLIGHT, could also provide performance monitoring for enterprise LANs and WANs.
Challenges in getting Accedian network monitor to the enterprise
Accedian needs to cross continents and cross the divide between telcos and enterprises to make this all work.
Shamus McGillicuddyanalyst at Enterprise Management Associates
Despite the possibilities, Accedian faces some hurdles. Integrating technologies is not easy, and the final product will have to be hassle-free to deploy, maintain and use, McGillicuddy said. Additionally, Accedian and Performance Vision will need a combined sales and marketing unit that can successfully sell both products.
Adding to the complexity is the fact that the majority of Performance Vision's customers are in Europe. "Accedian needs to cross continents and cross the divide between telcos and enterprises to make this all work," McGillicuddy said.
The Performance Vision system, which is available as an appliance or virtualized software, captures mirrored packet traffic from network taps or packet brokers attached to switches and routers. At the capture points, the software extracts metrics and transactional information and sends it to a central database where analytics are applied. Intelligence drawn from the analysis is displayed on the dashboard monitored by network operators.
The dashboard provides a view of all business-critical applications and their response times. When applications are sluggish, operators can determine the user groups affected and try to trace the cause by checking application transactions, network latency and server response time to queries. The dashboard also shows whether the queries contain errors.
"It's the whole Layer 2 through 7 stack that's decoded and presented in a few different views," said Scott Sumner, the director of business analytics at Accedian.
Accedian plans to complete analytics and data visualization integration between the Accedian network monitor and PVX by October. Examples of vendors that would compete with the combined product include ExtraHop Networks, NetScout and Corvil.
