Net Optics Aussie buy eases telcos' lives

After recently acquiring Australian network and application analysis company nMetrics, Net Optics is beefing up its network analysis and monitoring offerings both in Australia and throughout the rest of the world.

David Britt and Bob Shaw
(Credit: Josh Taylor/ZDNet Australia)

Net Optics provides physical layer devices that allow businesses to have visibility of all network traffic. The company also offers software with the devices, which allows businesses to filter and aggregate traffic on the network.

The company boasts more than 7500 enterprise and government customers across the globe, including major Australian telcos Optus, Telstra and Vodafone.

In January, the company announced the acquisition of nMetrics, and also acted as a distributor for Net Optics products through its sister company TripleLayer. The acquisition of both nMetrics and TripleLayer now allows Net Optics to offer its regular products in addition to gaining the abilities of nMetrics — which involve looking into the actual application level of the network, performing diagnostics and seeing what's actually happening with the traffic on a telco's network.

David Britt, co-founder of nMetrics and now director of application portfolio-management technology with Net Optics, told ZDNet Australia at Cisco Live that the way in which the company monitors traffic has evolved over time; now, time between network snapshots has been reduced from every five minutes to every five seconds.

"It's not just five seconds on volume; its website hits, email running through and latency. It's quite a challenge to do that, but now we're there, it's pretty cool," he said. The company now stores historical data for a period of time from months to years, but compresses the data so that over time, what remains saved is only a snapshot every five minutes, and then only every 30 minutes.

"If you're looking at a report for a whole year, you don't want five-minute samples ... you want your averaged-out data," he said.

"nMetrics had some cutting-edge technology," CEO Bob Shaw told ZDNet Australia. But that wasn't the only reason why Net Optics decided to bring the small company, with only seven Australian staff, into the 150-employee Net Optics.

"It was the team, the talent; we felt would help get us ahead to the next level, and then it was also the traction they had in some large customers in Australia that we felt we could take that technology around the world," he said.

He said that prior to announcing the takeover, Net Optics sat down with Optus, Telstra and Vodafone, and all seemed to be pleased with the joining of the two companies.

"They feel they'll now be able to deliver a message [to us] on how they want to deliver visibility, access and insight into the network, and we can do all of that together. So I think the overall level of service will improve, and we'll be able to give them technology solutions that solve their pain points."

"And they'll have one point of contact. They worked with both of us, but now we will be able to speak with one voice."

Josh Taylor travelled to Cisco Live as a guest of Cisco.