January 21, 2010 – Minneapolis, Minn. – Network Instruments, a worldwide leader in network performance management, today announced it had achieved 15 consecutive years of growth. The company has recorded 23 percent average growth each year for the past ten years.

Despite the recession, this growth was driven by continued demand for high-level performance management and reporting, retrospective network analysis, and solutions for monitoring virtualized networks.

"Achieving our fifteenth consecutive year of growth has been a challenging and amazing accomplishment," said Douglas Smith, co-founder and president of Network Instruments. "While our competitors are shrinking in these tough times, Network Instruments has remained strong. Our great customer relationships and superior product development have fueled the growth we've seen."

Vertical Market Growth
Many organizations realized immediate IT savings by switching to Network Instruments, which has allowed them to do more with a single solution and reduce their mean time to resolution (MTTR).

Demand was also strong from government, financial services, and insurance organizations migrating to 10 Gigabit Ethernet environments. Network Instruments significant performance advantages, including the only internally-designed and manufactured cards purpose-built for 10 Gigabit capture, allowed them to take advantage of this trend.

High-Level Performance Management
The needs of the enterprise market have changed significantly. Pressures to contain IT costs have forced companies to consolidate monitoring tools, while emerging technologies like virtualization and unified communications present new performance management challenges to address. Network Instruments answered these demands for cost savings and expanded application support in the latest release of its Observer® performance management platform by offering the following new features:

• Auto-Baselining: anticipate network problems before they impact users by baselining performance and time-based metrics
• Solution-Focused Workflows: reduce mean time to repair (MTTR) with user-defined investigations
• Expanded Application Transaction Analysis: in-depth application details for troubleshooting
• Unified Communications: robust support and analysis for secure VoIP (SRTP)
  

Retrospective Network Analysis (RNA)
While high-level views are valuable for anticipating trends and problems, packet-level analysis is the key to problem resolution. With demand for long-term packet capture increasing, Network Instruments introduced and enhanced its RNA offerings:

• GigaStor NetFlow Agent: extends the ability of network engineers to export NetFlow from any point on the network. GigaStor captures and converts packets into NetFlow data flows, pushing them out to multiple destinations simultaneously.
• 4 TB and 2 TB GigaStor Portables: The 4 TB portable unit is largest and fastest portable network recorder for performing in-the-field RNA. Both portable units analyze traffic across multiple network topologies, including gigabit, 10 Gb, WAN, and wireless.

Virtualization
While many companies implement virtualization, they often fail to anticipate its impact on application visibility. Network Instruments became the first analysis company to provide seamless visibility for applications traversing virtualized and physical networks. With the release of its Virtual TAP, network teams now have complete views of virtual traffic traversing physical networks, between virtual machine hosts, and between virtual machines on the same host. Further, all virtual traffic can be copied and sent to a GigaStor or ORS.

"Network Instruments addresses many of the key challenges delaying many from embracing virtualization fully," said Jim Frey, research director of Enterprise Management Associates. "In particular, making VM-to-VM communications flows visible to the outside world via the Virtual TAP feature could go a very long way in increasing the comfort level of IT security and compliance professionals, while paying additional benefits for those responsible for fixing things when performance bogs down."

Key Partnerships
Beyond increasing revenue through new customers and product offerings, Network Instruments expanded its market presence through key strategic alliances. Network Instruments was designated as a VMware Technology Alliance Partner.