Network General Buys Fidiela

Can the purchase of Fidiela, network monitoring vendor of the product NetVigil, pull Newtork General out if's downward slide? The marriage makes sense when looked at the connection made by Network General, from service orinented views of network and systems infrastructure provided by NetVigil, to the deep and mature packet decodes of the Network General Sniffer. But what are the chances that the integration will be tight? The intially Network General is on a fairly aggressive path to have contectual launches from NetVigil into filtered Top N packet streams and decodes on the Sniffer. This is the kind of correlation that allows operations to monitor and gather valuable diagnostics around the time of a problem, not only leveraging staff deployments, but also bringing the sniffer into a more realtime mode.

But there are vendors like NetScout, Network Physics, and Wildpacktes who are and have been of the same path. And in the case of Wildpactes have just as good if not better decodes as Sniffer. So that leaves Network General with the goal of becoming the high level pane of glass, that is the entry point for IT service monitoring. NetVigil isn't going to make it difficult, they have played in the BMC, CA, and HP OpenView worlds long enough to integrate, but it's going to be eaiser for them to get in the network guys office door than the CIOs. But if it works as well as it could, this could be a good thing.