NAPA Validates Network & Application Performance Management
I've been getting some questions lately on what Cisco's NAPA announcements are all about. Some of the wording Cisco uses sounds a lot like what NetScout does, but in reality there's not much overlap.
The NAPA (Network Application Performance Analysis) suite consists of several products that Cisco already had in their portfolio, five new products that Cisco will private-label and resell from other vendors-OPNET, Corvil, Trendium, and Opsware, and a set of professional services for installing and using the product set.
Cisco is finally waking up to what a lot of us have been saying for quite some time - that networks need to be application aware. Their answer is mostly going to be delivered in their SONA and AON architectures (within their infrastructure devices) but they also needed to cobble together some management tools to make it all work. And that's exactly what they've done with NAPA - cobble together a patchwork of products that lets them play "one stop shop" for smaller customer clients (some assembly required, of course). They already admit that this won't work in big enterprise and telecomm, where no one is about to hand the henhouse keys to the fox...
In many ways, this is a real positive for established independent tools suppliers like NetScout. With Cisco beating the drum that performance management is a "must-have", and not a "nice-to-have", we can simply focus on how our solutions are the best to meet the need. The NetScout solution, for instance, combines the functions of a majority of the (at best) loosely-coupled NAPA components into a single, tightly-integrated solution that doesn't require professional services to get up and running, giving us a huge advantage both in terms of operational effectiveness and total cost.
The biggest challenge here is, as Cisco has always faced, establishing credibility as a provider of multivendor management tools. I like Dennis Drogseth's comments on the cultural challenges facing Cisco.
There is one other curious aspect to the Cisco NAPA announcement. Why didn't they mention the Sheer Networks technology at all? One of the rags mentioned it, but the subsequent details leave it out. Certainly there is overlap between the Sheer Networks products and the NAPA suite. Guess Cisco will have to sort that one out later....
