DNS - Opnet: Solving Problems at the Core

Editor's Note: This article refers to a video interview shot at Interop (News - Alert) 2010. To view TMCnet's entire library of videos from Interop and other industry shows, demonstrations and interviews in our in-house studio, visit our Video News home page.

TMCnet took advantage of the excitement of Interop 2010 to speak with a number of key industry players at Interop this year, including Opnet. Alain Cohen, president of Opnet, visited the TMCnet media booth for an interview captured in this video .
 

In describing his company, Cohen noted that 23-year old Opnet is a player in the IT space with two major suites of products - application performance and network performance. The main idea is to reduce problems in the operational environment. When problems do happen, they aim to reduce mean time to repair.

Opnet has certainly seen an evolution of products over time - focused more on technology of networking itself in the beginning. Those products eventually led them into analyzing networks, find problems, troubleshoot issues and from there, added application analysis. The company has the ability to find problems wherever they might be within the organization.

When asked about examples, Cohen said, "Everyday our customers are solving problems of mission critical apps. So you have your users call in typically to a help desk and say 'we have problems with the performance of an app. It's slow or it's unavailable; what's going on; transactions are taking minutes when they used to take seconds…' Those are the things that we get to the bottom of faster than other types of solutions because we're analyzing throughout the environment, at many different touchpoints, putting many different types of information together."

Opnet focuses on isolating the problem. Sometimes the problem is in the network; sometimes it is in the server, but which server, which software or which layer has to be identified. They get into the layers and the code to find the problem.

Cohen noted that without a doubt, everyone wants to do more with less. While some spending has come back, it is not back to previous levels. People are more cautious, so automation and productivity are key in the market. Smart intelligent tools that are more automated make the difference.

As for going forward, Cohen noted that a challenge in the space is always new technologies being introduced, virtualization and WAN optimization that need to be kept track of to deliver performance. Opnet focuses on continuing to improve throughput rates and deliver scalability. Overall, breadth and depth across the environment will continue to drive demand for Opnet.

To learn more about Opnet and what they are doing in this space, check out this video in full.

Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMCnet and has also written for eastbiz.com. To read more of Susan's articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Marisa Torrieri