NetSocket, a provider of real-time cloud service assurance technology, recently announced its Cloud Experience Manager (CEM) IP product geared at managing the end-user experience in different types of environments.
CEM, built on NetSocket's IP Correlation Engine, aims to provide visibility into session, content and network quality on a hop-by-hop basis and deliver immediate insight into network issues, the company said. These can include voice, video and data degradation, incomplete visibility into multivendor hybrid cloud, dropped connections and IP network events. The technology is delivered in an appliance or SaaS model, and measures the user experience by automatically correlating session, content and IP topology quality events in real time for every individual user, according to NetSocket. CEM provides one screen to anticipate, isolate and offer solutions to remediate issues, the company said.
IP assurance is something vendors have offered for a long time, notes Michael Biddick, CEO of Fusion PPT, a cloud computing consulting firm. "I would argue that the term IP assurance is really about packet management, customer experience management or application performance management--something that a lot of vendors have been doing for quite some time," he says.
Competing vendors that already offer this capability as a passive, physical appliance include NetScout, CA/NetQoS and OPNET AppExpert, according to Biddick, who cautions that the appliance model has its drawbacks. "Offering the solution as a physical appliance introduces problems for public clouds that may move their virtual machines quite a bit from data center to data center, even in other countries. The use of these appliances requires an understanding of the network topology to application topology that often is not possible in the public cloud."
Cloud providers and enterprises that look to deploy IP assurance products will also find it a challenge, says Biddick. "SaaS is also a hard deployment model, given the volume of traffic that needs to be analyzed, and many vendors have shifted from this approach over the years after they find customer resistance." But he adds that most are dropping the SaaS approach due to low customer adoption and are switching to a virtual appliance instead.
CEM "is playing a critical role in ensuring the quality of collaboration and communication services offered through our cloud computing services," said Stephen Webster, president and CEO of Houston-based StratITsphere, a NetSocket customer, in a statement. "As an end user and provider of this service to our customers, we can achieve per-session visibility into the service quality of multivendor cloud communications, something which no other cloud computing service currently offers."
Pricing for CEM starts at $2 per IP-connected device and decreases based on the number of endpoints.
