Vineyard Networks Upgrades Application Intelligence For OEMs, Service Providers

Vineyard Networks has announced the latest version of its application intelligence engine, which it sells to service providers as well as into the OEM security and network vendor markets. The Network Application Visibility Layer (NAVL) library now features thousands of applications, provides a custom application definition interface to add proprietary apps, and optimizes performance for standard multiprocessor hardware.

Application intelligence is fast becoming a critical component in both security and network
operations, with the proliferation of Web-based applications, social media, apps on mobile devices, and bandwidth-intensive apps such as voice and streaming video. Network layer-and protocol-based controls are no longer deemed sufficient as enterprises try to manage access by users and applications and bar potentially dangerous apps. Organizations need to manage network traffic based on application priority and deliver specific application services to customers.

Palo Alto Networks has been the early application intelligence leader in the security market. Its "next generation" firewalls, providing highly granular app definition combined with user identification and activity, have gained significant market share. Other security vendors have moved to follow suit, either developing their own app intelligence capability or acquiring it.

Vineyard is betting that there is a big OEM market, as most security and network vendors will want to license their technology rather than invest heavily in time, resources and cash to develop their own. They hope to be the application intelligence analog to Snort in the IDS market, says Jason Richards, Vineyard CEO.

He sees opportunities to sell NAVL to security appliance vendors, particularly UTM, which he says is showing the most current activity, as well as WAN optimization and application delivery controller companies. "A lot of companies have some element of [application intelligence] technology in their platform," he says, but not to the degree to meet the demand of customers for application visibility."Vineyard also anticipates a big market opportunity among telecommunications service providers. The providers have put most of their energy into developing faster transmission from mobile device to tower, but not on the back end when the traffic is converted to IP.

"Application usage over mobile networks is skyrocketing, and those apps require bandwidth," Richards says. "Their networks are not built to handle this type of data. The backbones of their networks are being overwhelmed." Telecomms can also leverage application intelligence to facilitate billing for specialized app services, such as social media packages and streaming video.

NAVL version 2.7 adds a large number of applications to the library, and provides an interface to easily add custom applications, which are so prevalent among enterprises. The engine architecture has been optimized for multiprocessor/multi-core to support greater than 10Gbps speed on off-the-shelf x86 hardware.

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