Network monitoring has gone from being a relatively sleepy corner of the enterprise IT world to suddenly becoming a category where mergers and acquisitions are beginning to regularly occur.
JDSU this week announced it has completed its acquisition of Network Instruments for $200 million in cash. The finalization of the deal comes on the heels of the acquisition of Net Optics by Ixia.
David Heard, president of JDSU’s Network and Service Enablement business segment, of which Network Instruments is now a part, says a major driver of the acquisition is that the line between telecommunications services and enterprise networks continues to get blurrier. In addition, the complexity of the networking environment both inside and out of the data center is creating increased demand for network monitoring tools that can make sense of a raft of machine data. In fact, JDSU values the market opportunity for products and services from Network Instruments at $1 billion.
Heard says that from an application performance perspective, organizations want more visibility into the networking issues that affect application performance. Those applications now typically span multiple data centers. Network Instruments primarily focused on data center networks, while the JDSU networking product portfolio caters mainly to telecommunications carriers. Heard says the opportunity now is to extend the functionality of both those product portfolios into each other’s respective domains.
For example, Heard notes that with the rise of mobile computing in particular, the amount of chatty network traffic that affects application performance at different times in often unexpected ways has risen considerably across all networks.
Obviously, rising interest in Big Data analytics is also helping to drive a lot of the merger activity in the network monitoring space as companies look to optimize applications performance by analyzing network traffic at a more granular level. In addition, the rise of virtualization has created demand for tools that can address both physical and virtual networks.
As a result, it’s pretty clear that going forward there is going to be an increased need to monitor application performance on an end-to-end basis that will drive a level of convergence in the network monitoring space that is just now only beginning.
