Cisco funding moves network software firm forward
8/28/00
By Michael Hardy
With $10 million in hand from new partner Cisco Systems Inc. and other investors, Response Networks Inc. is moving rapidly to build new markets for its network monitoring technology.
Launched in Alexandria, Va., in 1993 as Network Performance Systems, the company first specialized in monitoring the network performance of mainframe systems through a product called RouteView, said founder Ivan Shefrin, now the senior vice president of business development.
“Our objective was to build some experience running a business, build a product, build a customer base and then expand,” said Shefrin. “We knew that given our self-funded basis, we’d have to pick a very narrow beachhead. We knew we weren’t going to get rich and retire off the product. It was done for a reason.”
Five years later, the company made a planned shift in direction to offer products that would monitor the performance of other internal networks, including client/server systems, and changed its name. Over the past few months, the company has evolved once again, hiring Ted Joseph as its new chief executive officer and John Morency as senior vice president of marketing and program management.
The new executive corps, some of whom work out of the company’s second headquarters in North Andover, Mass., are targeting Internet companies with the new ResponseCenter product, aided by the Cisco investment.
“The world of intra-enterprise management software was becoming mature and the opportunities were fewer and fewer,” Morency said in explaining the shift. “But the public network was exploding, and it was really clear where the company should go.”
“In the past two years, the market has clearly shifted to a service-provider model,” Shefrin said. “We were pretty early, 15 months ago, to recognize that opportunity.”
Using ResponseCenter, companies can monitor their network response time and uptime, and spot potential trouble areas. An Internet service provider can document that preferred customers are getting the fast response times they are paying for, or a company network manager can identify the points where communications bog down between a main office and a branch.
The program sets up “intelligent agents,” software on the network that sends requests back to the main server, just as an Internet user would. By measuring the time it takes the signal to travel to the server and the request to be filled, administrators can keep an eye on network performance.
“It gives a customer the ability to understand the availability and performance of an application or a Web site as seen from the perspective of the user,” Morency said. “The traditional management systems really couldn’t do that effectively because they were all designed to run on central servers. [Those systems are] not good at understanding the experience of a customer in Sheboygan.”
Contrary to Shefrin’s assertion, some analysts believe Response Networks has charged onto a stage already crowded with contenders.
“Their biggest negative at this point is they’re late into the market,” said John McConnell, president of McConnell Associates, a consulting company in Boulder, Colo. “But they’re answering that with a much more comprehensive reporting and management system. They have very powerful measuring agents, compared to some of their similar brethren.”
But even there, the company isn’t infallible, cautioned Teré Bracco, director of enterprise infrastructure at Current Analysis, a Sterling, Va.-based business research company. ResponseCenter can’t passively monitor actual network traffic, it can only run its specified active tests.
“They need to do passive testing,” said Bracco, who works in Current Analysis’ Dallas office. “With the Cisco backing, that would make them formidable.”
Passive testing is coming in a future release, Morency said.
The active tests deliver real customer value, said Dick Vandenberg, systems manager of First Tennessee Bank in Memphis. He used the product to measure the effectiveness of network upgrades after the bank replaced teller and customer service applications with much more demanding ones in 180 branches.
Now that the bank has also upgraded its workstations and servers, some branches can send transactions in under a second and others at an acceptable three or four seconds, he said. When the new applications first went on, “it could be 12 or 13 seconds. The teller can only make so much patter and small talk before the customer starts to wonder what’s going on.”
Buoyed by the investment, Response Networks will be working on eight different initiatives for Cisco, Morency said. “Cisco has software technology today that is intended to deliver levels of throughput and response time. But they don’t really have the software to measure and monitor and report on all that. That’s a great opportunity where we and they can collaborate.”
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