Last week I heard the news that CA is purchasing NetQoS.  To me, this is yet another blow to the ‘best of breed’ approach.  Consumer choice in this arena has gotten smaller yet again.  As someone who competes in the performance management space, I was not at all upset to see the news of the acquisition.  There is now one less competitor to have to contend with.

Now on to the purchase of NetQoS by CA.  CA states that the purchase is focused on helping to strengthen its year-old cloud computing focus and application delivery.  My experiences with NetQoS over the years have pretty much been broken down into three categories:

1. Reporter Analyzer – NetQoS unquestionably has a good Netflow solution offering.  This is where I have seen them most often.
2. Super Agent – This technology has always been somewhat interesting to me.  Super Agent listens passively on the wire and then utilizes algorithms to breakdown the application flow into desktop, network and server response time categories.  The concept is solid.  My only frustration is that it is based on actual user-based traffic.  Unfortunately, users are not the most consistent performers in terms of executing transactions.  For this reason, I have often been more interested in leveraging synthetic application transactions that can be distributed, scheduled and run at predictable intervals.  I believe it makes it easier and quicker to spot problems.
3. NetVoyant – NetQoS purchased RedPoint in 2005 to complement its Reporter Analyzer with an active SNMP polling solution.  I have seen NetVoyant is a smaller subset of their accounts.

When looking at the cloud computing strategy it is not immediately clear to me what functionality CA is acquiring with NetQoS.  I’ll have to follow this a bit closer to see where this goes.

On the application delivery side of the house I do see the logic of pairing the technology from the Wiley acquisition with the Super Agent logic.  It seems to me that a customer would potentially utilize both technologies to gain analysis from the dual perspectives of Wiley and Super Agent.  For clients looking to validate data points from two different perspectives, and can afford to do this, there would appear to be some benefit.

When I first heard about CA’s intent to purchase NetQoS, I have to admit I was perplexed.  It took me a bit of thinking to map the strategy discussed above to understand the direction.  My immediate thought was:

-    CA buys Concord and gets a leading network performance management solution

-    CA buys NetQoS and gets a leading network performance management solution

Hmm, seems awfully redundant.  I wonder which solution will end up getting sunset or put on the back burner.  CA’s reps are now going to have two extremely similar network performance management solutions to market.  Or, CA’s product development will spend their customary time determining product line winners and losers.  Should be interesting.

I plan to follow up this blog post with another blog aimed at discussing the performance management market in general.  This seems to be a market with a lot of legs as of late.

Cheers!

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